First, The Washington Post just published “What do people really use chatbots for? It’s a lot of sex and homework.“They looked at a large research dataset of AI chatbot conversations called WildChat and classified the conversations. They found that the most common use – 21% – was “creative writing and role playing.” One of his Example that might be: Asking a bot to write fan fiction, movie scripts, or Dungeons & Dragons characters.

The second most common category of chatbot conversations – 18% – was for homework help. (An example: “Explain the Monroe Doctrine in one sentence.”)

Other less frequently used categories included things like search, translation, and coding/programming use.

In addition to post reporting, there’s another new reason to be suspicious of homework “help” – and maybe cheating! – Chat is a widely popular use for GPT and other text-based AI.

gave The Wall Street Journal reported that OpenAI is developing a tool that can detect writing that used cheat GPT. – but it won’t release the tool (yet).

This tool will make it so that ChatGPT will create a sort of “watermark” based on the way the words are selected. The watermark will be undetectable to the human eye but can be picked up by AI – and will be 99.9% accurate at telling whether something was written by ChatGPT or a real human.

Still, OpenAI has reportedly not released the tool, much to the dismay of some within the company. An OpenAI spokesperson told the WSJ that the company has concerns that the tool could harm non-native English speakers who use ChatGPT. “The text watermarking method we are developing is technically promising but has significant risks as we weigh researching alternatives,” the spokesperson told the WSJ.

Well, reasonable. I think we all like the idea of ​​OpenAI taking its time and thinking long and hard about the potential pitfalls of releasing a new tool.

But here’s the other part: According to the report, “OpenAI surveyed ChatGPT users and found that 69% believe that fraud detection technology will lead to false accusations using AI. About 30% said they would use ChatGPT less if it deployed watermarks and competitors did not.(emphasis mine)

It seems like a good sign that “cheating on my homework” is a very popular use of ChatGPT – and OpenAI knows it.

when Sam Altman was spotted driving a multi-million dollar Koenigsegg Regera.the most common comments on TikTok were, “Brother drove me to half his classes last year, I hope he enjoys this beauty.”

There is also Evidence from last summer that ChatGPT Usage dropped off as summer vacation began — a good indication that student usage was a big driver.

Of course, there are many unique and wonderful uses for generative AI text generation, Like writing a fan letter to your favorite Olympian.

I admit that my skepticism about how useful ChatGPT is as more than just a homework machine comes with its own baggage: AI is an existential threat to my work as a person who uses words. types, and I don’t mind writing things down. Although I get to write things like this rather than say a three-paragraph summary of Monroe’s doctrine. If I were still an 11th grader, I suspect I would probably be very excited about it.