OpenAI’s ChatGPT has over 300 million weekly users, who prompt the chatbot for help with a wide variety of writing tasks. Professionals increasingly use it to draft emails, memos, and presentations, and students are using it more than ever for help with assignments.
ChatGPT usage will increase even more exponentially now that OpenAI has integrated the chatbot into Siri, iOS, and various writing tools.
But is ChatGPT safe? Although there are risks—such as privacy, plagiarism, and accuracy— ChatGPT is safer if you’re aware of these risks and the main strategies for mitigating them.
Since ChatGPT was released in 2022, generative AI has become ubiquitous. It’s an integral part of the Google search experience, and it’s embedded in most of the tools that students and professionals use every day.
Now that generative AI is literally everywhere, understanding how it works is a crucial part of digital literacy, critical thinking, and academic integrity.
Generative AI is an artificial intelligence technology that generates original media, such as text, images, or videos. To generate this media, generative AI tools (e.g., ChatGPT, Gemini, or Davinci AI) need prompts from human users. For example, you can prompt generative AI tools to draft a cover letter or create a song in a particular style.
AI is getting better and better at writing texts that mimic humans. This means it’s becoming increasingly important to understand how to detect AI writing and know when content was written by a human.
There are strategies that can help detect AI writing, including:
One consequence of the AI boom has been a surge in AI detectors—sometimes called AI writing detectors or AI content detectors. AI detectors work by analyzing features of a text and evaluating if they better match human samples or AI-generated samples.
These tools are becoming increasingly popular, as people want to know when AI has been used in the writing they work with.
However, just because AI detectors are popular doesn’t mean they are always reliable. Therefore, it’s important to understand how AI detectors work, so as to better understand the results they give us.