There seems to be a real panic among not only the professoriate, but also employers, about what ChatGPT is doing to “kids these days.” The concern in higher education is that ChatGPT makes cheating easier and, by extension, the worry among employers is that all of the college-educated candidates they might interview in the coming years are really not as “college-educated” as they may appear on paper. Is this panic justified?

ChatGPT, no doubt, represents a major advance in publicly-accessible artificial intelligence software. ChatGPT, also without doubt, makes “cheating” easier for college students and makes the “misrepresentation of one’s skill-sets” easier for employment candidates. However, ChatGPT is also a genuinely novel learning/working tool that is practically unprecedented in its sophistication. 

In this episode, we chat about what ChatGPT is, how it works, and what should (and should not) make us panicked about it.

This episode references the following thinkers/ideas/texts and “programs”:

• ChatGPT by Open AI
• What is GPT3?
• How ChatGPT works
• Our previous HBS episode (Season 5, Episode 73) on “Artificial Personhood (with Regina Rini)”
• “Google Panics Over ChatGPT [The AI Wars Have Begun]”
• Chris Gilliard and Pete Rorabaugh, “You’re not going to like how colleges respond to ChatGPT” (Slate, 2023)
• Beth McMurtie, “ChatGPT is Everywhere” (Chronicle of Higher Education, March 2023)
• Noam Chomsky, “The False Promise of ChatGPT” (The New York Times, March 2023)

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