Recently, the infamous question resurfaces: will robots take over the world?

While technology has continued to take vast strides of progress, artificial intelligence has started to make advances in the classroom.

ChatGPT is a language processing tool that allows people to have a conversation with an AI bot online, similar to chatting on social media. This digital ‘friend’ allows anyone to ask for certain tasks — such as writing an essay.

This ability frightens several teachers, as ChatGPT writes billions of different essays for the same prompt, making it hard to tell if students are cheating. All one has to do is type in a prompt, and within a minute, a complete essay matching the prompt is created. However, the true problem stems from how writing skills could decline in students everywhere.

AP Lit and Honors English teacher Mr. Bevins shares, “When people talk about revolutionary technologies that can change the way that we live — I think that this is it. And I think that this is being used, not just by students, it’s being used by professionals, and it is used by people who are increasingly relying on technology to do work for them. Which is my only fear–that we will continuously get more and more lazy and lose the ability to do hard things. But when something hard in life comes to us, we won’t have the ability to deal with it, and we’ll shatter and break. ”

Ms. Barclay, also an English teacher, has similar thoughts to Mr. Bevins: “I worry students will avoid putting in the hard work. The drafting and revising processes of writing an essay is meant to teach students how to be better writers and thinkers. But without them, students will struggle in later years. It doesn’t bode well for the future of our world if we’re avoiding critical thinking and tough assignments. I don’t understand what the use of it is. This is just deeply troubling.”

Junior Lianna Enright had a discussion about the world-changing bot with her AP Lang class. She reveals, “I am a little worried about the future of students because they lose the potential to create trustful relationships with their teachers… and that leads to in-class writing. Which I don’t like.”

There are many skills that Rosary prides itself in teaching its students. Nevertheless, the new, easily-accessible AI feature threatens the integrity and skill of students everywhere. Technology was created to be used as a tool, but it threatens to become a highly addictive piece of daily life that ultimately has the potential to hurt people in the end. The world has already begun to rapidly change in terms of technological advancement, and this new piece of software might just take us to a new level — one where students develop a worrying dependency on technology.

Who knows, your ‘friendly’ ChatGPT bot could’ve written this article.

What do you think about ChatGPT? Feel free to comment down below!