The Writing Dilemma: Assessing ChatGPT's Essay Skills

0:00Nash Falls is the relentless new thriller from number one New York Times bestselling author David Baldacci When mild-mannered business analyst Walter Nash is recruited by the FBI to help bring down a global crime network, his life is turned completely upside down. Publishers Weekly says, in Baldacci's long list of heroes, Walter Nash is among the most memorable. Experience the full cast audio production of Nash Falls, led by McLeod Andrews. Available from Hachette Audio wherever audiobooks are sold. Also available in hardcover and ebook. A lot of people have been talking about ChatGPT and how it's going to disrupt education and even how it's going to disrupt content creation online.

0:40So today I wanted to talk about is it actually good at writing essays? Do these essays pass off as human? Are they easily detectable? What is the quality of these? And then I wanted to talk about some of the strengths and weaknesses of ChatGPT when it comes to specifically writing essays and content. So first off, if we're talking about the strengths. I think one of the main strengths of ChatGPT is its ability to generate text that's grammatically correct and coherent. This personally is something I would have loved in university as when I first got there, I spent a lot of time in the language, I believe it was called the Writing Center, the Language Writing Center, English Writing Center, something like that.

1:20Anyways, there was these tutors that really helped me. There was me and all of the foreign exchange students there getting our essays written. That was not my strong point. I was better in the business department. But in any case, this is something that would have come in very handy for me. So this is something ChatGPT is great at. It's achieved through its use of a pretty sophisticated algorithm that analyzes the structure and essentially the syntax of natural language. So So Chai GPT is able to use this analysis to generate text that's syntactically and semantically sound. And in case you are not an English major, the definition of what that actually means, syntactically is essentially in a way that relates to the grammatical arrangements of words in a sentence.

2:07So essentially everything it's been trained to do, it knows exactly how words in a sentence should be arranged for proper grammar, which is very useful, especially when you consider of the fact that ChatGPT is good at virtually any language you would like to use it in. So it's got the grammar down for all languages, which is pretty incredible. And then semantically essentially means that it's in a way that is connected with the meaning of words. So what's really impressive about ChatGPT is it really understands the definition of words, what they mean, and when they combine that with the grammar, it's just really good at understanding sentences and creating things that are very coherent and make sense.

2:45So this means that the text that's generated by ChatGPT is really easy to read and understand, and this makes it pretty suitable for a very wide range of applications, including essays. So another strength of ChatGPT is its ability to learn and adapt to new situations. This is achieved through the use of machine learning algorithms, obviously, that enable ChatGPT to analyze and process all the data that's already done on the back end in order to produce the results it can produce now. So as a result, ChatGPT is able to generate text that is very contextually appropriate and relevant. So as an example, if ChatGPT is asked to write an essay about a specific topic, it's going to analyze the data it's been given, and it's going to use this analysis to generate text that's relevant to the topic, right?

3:34Obviously, we've all seen this in ChatGPT in the past, using it to write things. It's also capable of generating text that is original and creative. So this is achieved through the use of neural networks that enable ChatGPT to generate text that is pretty similar to human writing. ChatGPT is able to use this technology to generate text that's not only grammatically correct and coherent, but also unique and creative. And when I say creative, I'm going to put a little asterisk by that because a lot of people worry that if everyone used ChatGPT to write their essays or to write content for their websites, we'd really get into this homogenized kind of system where everything is created by the same person is similar.

4:12But I will say you can get a lot of creativity, right? This thing was trained on the entire, you know, all books and websites ever created essentially, not literally, but pretty close. And so there's a ton of creativity there. And if you want your chat GPT responses to be more creative, all you have to do is to put in the prompt that you give it, like write it in the tone of this person or write it with a bunch of creative concepts that are not very common or thought of before. Like you can generate prompts that will give you more unique or creative results. So, and I've, you know, we've all seen people do these, we've seen the screenshots and whatnot, but I think that's important because a lot of people really worry that the creativity is being killed when you generate stuff on ChatGPT.

4:56And while that is true to some degree, as long as a person writing an essay or creating a piece of content with it are using prompts and pushing it in a direction that elicits creative results, it is pretty powerful. And in addition to that, you can use your own creativity and imagination while writing an essay or while coming up with a piece of content if you direct it in a way that it hasn't been directed. And you start off with this point, which proves this point, this point, and this point, right? It's not something necessarily that Chad Chibi-T came up with. You put in all of the overarching, like the architecture of the essay, if you will, and the thoughts and what it should talk about in a way that someone else hasn't thought of, but it's able to kind of put the filler stuff in there for you.

5:37So that's kind of my side note on creativity and uniqueness with ChatGPT. That being said, as far as weaknesses goes, some of the weaknesses that we do have to talk about is its lack of human-like intuition. So while it's able to analyze data and generate text that's contextually appropriate, it's not able to really fully understand the nuances and sub, like the subtleties of human language. And this means that it's going to occasionally generate text that's off topic or relevant. So if you're using it to write an essay, you definitely want to double check that. And I'd say another weakness is just it's a lack of like common sense, right?

6:13We have to really think about what ChatGPT is. And it's a language predictor model, essentially. So it's predicting what comes next. It's not necessarily looking at the logic of what should be said or what logically follows. So it's not capable of understanding the world in the same way that humans do. Obviously, this thing isn't sentient, like some people would have you believe. and that means that it's going to occasionally generate text that's like literally just nonsensical or illogical. So like an example is like if ChatGPT is asked to write an essay about the benefits of exercise, it might generate text that includes statements like exercise can make you fly, like just like something crazy.

6:49It's actually, to be honest, it's getting a lot better at this as they continue to train it about just making like completely crazy statements. But if you told it to write you an essay about how exercising can make you more likely to fly, it would just write you that essay, which obviously is completely not true. That's not technically correct, but it's going to do it because you told it to. So that's another thing to look out for. So pretty much if your hypothesis on an essay is incorrect, if your thesis or theory is incorrect to begin with, it can continue with that. It can come up with validating statements and arguments, but it's going to go off of something that's wrong.

7:26So that's definitely something concerning and something to consider. So in conclusion, as far as the question of whether ChatGPT can write good essays, it's a pretty complex question. It requires a closer look at the strengths and weaknesses of the AI model. And while it has a lot of strengths, including its ability to generate text that's really, that's, you know, grammatically correct, coherent, original, and creative, it also has some weaknesses, including, you know, lack of human-like intuition, common sense. And this really does play into, you know, how you want to use it for writing an essay probably can't write it start to finish, but you can use it for some of the components, helping you come up with better grammar, structuring things, writing good essay outlines, that kind of stuff.

8:07So it's gonna be interesting to see how people use this in the future. Very powerful tool. And I see a lot of disruption that it is creating.