The first thing I would like to point out is that this column was written by me, choosing each of the words, without copying them to anyone and without the help of any artificial intelligence application. The effort to go after the right word to express ideas is entirely my authorship and it is so because that is what I like to do, what gives me fulfillment and contentment. That said, I'd like to confess that I went in exploring ChatGPT and felt like I was poking a hole in my stomach. I asked it to write an essay in Spanish that supported the relationship between philosophy and literature and he left me with a square eye. The text was, in addition to being well written, supported and its ideas were coherent and cohesive.
Curiosity killed the cat, as the popular voices say. It was that curiosity that led me to investigate the topic everyone is talking about. In the halls of the academies, teachers worry when they realize that many of the tasks, they ask their students were not completed by them and that there is an immense possibility that they have been solved by a robot. For many students, this is wonderful, because they effortlessly manage to meet school requirements. It happens at all educational levels. They can ask ChatGPT to solve an elementary math problem or they can ask it to answer a philology question.
The experience with ChatGPT was amazing and I must confess that it got on my nerves. At the same time, it left a bitter taste in my mouth. It made me wonder if so, much artificial intelligence isn't going to result in foolish humanity. I know that I am not the first to ask these questions about progress. Socrates did not like writing because he said it would weaken the memory. If he could see what happens today with cell phones, his bones would be removed from the grave. It is also true that technology is available and must be used, but I have my reservations.
And, is that if to answer a question, solve a problem, to issue an opinion I no longer need to learn, investigate, analyze, or evaluate because that can already be done by a machine; If to solve something or face a challenge it is no longer necessary for me to use my judgment and delegate that responsibility to an intelligent system, what am I going to become? The answer gives me goosebumps. And then I wonder: is that where I want to go?
And, from another point of view, where is the honesty when I put my name to an idea that gave me a cybernetic system that took a few seconds to produce the result? Beyond that, in a more immediate scope, academic honesty is what is on a knife's edge. Today, a student can submit an assignment that was prepared by an application and submit it to grading. It's terrible to imagine what will happen to a medical student who, instead of studying and solving his tasks, asks ChatGPT — or those which shall come in the future — to do them. The answer is simple: you won't learn. Who in their right mind would put themselves in the hands of a person who spoke wonderfully about the resolution of a medical case made by an application? Not me, or would I? How am I going to know if that professional was an honest student?
If that were the way, perhaps the Socratic conclusion would be adequate and humanity would be at risk of seeing one of its most precious gifts, which is intelligence, falter. This is the tip of the iceberg, how many students will be looking for a shorter route, a scam that saves them effort and results in a grade that does not belong to them; How many teachers will we be receiving perfect papers that are not evidence of the knowledge acquired?
I can presume that this concern overwhelms institutions such as Harvard, Sorbonne, and Stanford, as well as UNAM or Anahuac, public and private schools. Without any other eagerness, I am sure that academic corporations are concerned about so much plagiarism, so many copies, so much scholarly garbage, and so many failures to cite sources, to reveal consulted bibliography. Political scandals serve to uncover sewers and the lack of academic honesty that we have witnessed in recent days is only the tip of the iceberg. I can assure you that any curious person who had the desire to investigate the subject would encounter an unmanageable number of people who copied, plagiarized and now delivered work done by ChatGPT.
The world is changing and we cannot go against technological progress. However, it seems to me that we must open our eyes and reflect if that is the future we want and we have to hurry before having to go to ask ChatGPT.