REACHING deadlines is a struggle for everyone, and every college student knows it. The cycle of academics, extracurriculars, and other personal ventures may have some of us buried under piles of neverending backlogs and activities—often making us desperate for an easy way out. With the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the arena of academia comes a new contender, ChatGPT, who’s lately been notorious for enabling academic dishonesty and students’ half-baked effort. But is it really that big of a concern?

According to ChatGPT, they are “AI language model designed to assist with a wide range of tasks using natural language processing and machine learning algorithms.” It can be used to answer questions, generate text, and provide information on various topics. You’ll find it widely better than other essay generators upon using it. So much so that according to The Conversation, their recent study published in Finance Research Letters showed that the chatbot could create a finance paper that would be good enough to be published in academic journals. 

For a tool with that much power comes a great ethical responsibility on our part as students to not use it for plagiarism and cheating. However, as we all know, these cases are a matter of principle that some choose to turn a blind eye to. Additionally, the possible over-reliance on the product can make people more susceptible to misinformation and the rise of possible privacy concerns. According to Wired, OpenAI, ChatGPT’s developer, has gotten into trouble for using personal information shared online for the text generative system. This issue was addressed on March 31 by Italy’s data regulator in issuing a temporary emergency decision demanding the company to stop using the personal information of the millions of Italians that are included in their training data. OpenAI has stopped its accessibility to people in Italy and has responded to the officials who are further investigating.

All of this being said, do I think ChatGPT is concerning in terms of inciting plagiarism and creating a breach of privacy—the short answer is yes. But do I think we should stop using it? No. ChatGPT is a tool that, when wielded properly, won’t be a threat to any student or professor. If cheating is a concern, AI-made material can be detected. If privacy is a concern, do not feed personal or sensitive information to the chatbot. With an application that has this much potential, I believe that we should consider policing instead of banning it all throughout. The application has instilled valid concerns, but its pros may just outweigh the cons.