Research Guides: ChatGPT: Let's Not All Panic At Once: What can ChatGPT Do?

ChatGPT can write and rewrite computer code

"OpenAI highlights ChatGPT's dialogue capability in examples for debugging code where it can ask for clarifications, and receive hints from a person to arrive at a better answer. It trained the large language models behind ChatGPT (GPT-3 and GPT 3.5) using Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF)."

"Code on the Wall" by Nat W is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

ChatGPT can create music or compose lyrics

Can ChatGPT Compose Music? Sort Of.
"You can use ChatGPT to generate melodies and chord progressions for a song or even generate entire compositions. Just remember that ChatGPT is a text-based model after all, which means you will need to input some pretty specific information on things like style, instrumentation, and tempo for the bot to work."

ChatGPT can write an A graded essay

"Why I'm not worried about ChatGPT"
Regarding ChatGPT and Essay Writing: "Here's what I plan to do about chatbots in my classes: pretty much nothing. Let me say first that as much as I value the substance of what I teach, realistically my students will not spend more than a semester thinking about it. It's unlikely that Goldman Sachs or Leakey's Plumbing or wherever my students end up will expect their employees to have a solid background in philosophy of mind. Far more likely is that the employees will be required to write a letter or an analysis or a white paper, and to do this they will need to know how to write effectively in the first place. This is the skill that I most hope to cultivate in my students, and I spend a lot of time reading their essays and providing them with comments that really do lead to improvements on subsequent assignments. In-class exams - the ChatGPT-induced alternative to writing assignments - are worthless when it comes to learning how to write, because no professor expects to see polished prose in such time-limited contexts." ~Dr. Lawrence Shapiro, professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison

How to cheat on your final paper: Assigning AI for student writing

Dr. Paul Fyfe, an English professor at NC State University, conducted a study in 2021 with his undergraduates using an earlier iteration of ChatGPT3, aptly named "ChatGPT2".

"For this assignment, students harvested content from an installation of GPT-2, then wove that content into their final essay. At the end, students offered a 'revealed' version of the essay as well as their own reflections on the experiment." This experimental pedagogical approach prompted a thoughtful student to ask this question for the final essay: "'The question then becomes, whose writing is this; who can take ownership? The answer to this question is not easy to decide and seems to be more complicated than the question of whether it is true or false. I don't exactly have the right to claim ownership of it, but I will argue that all writers borrow ideas and style from others.' (undergraduate student with GPT-2 italicized)"