In November of 2022, during my first year of university, I was sitting in the library, staring at a jumbled to-do list and 15 tabs cluttering my computer screen when a friend came to sit with me. With a glint of mischief in his eye, he asked me if I had heard about “it,” then turned his screen around as if he were revealing the cracked coordinates of Atlantis. In a way, he was: there, on his laptop, was ChatGPT in its newborn glory.

At first, some friends used it to generate jokes and cheesy one-liners, typing in harmless prompts like, “Write a haiku about my philosophy professor,” and, “Flirt only using metaphors.” But soon, it was creeping into places I wasn’t sure it should.

Not long after the AI platform made its debut in my life, a friend was applying for a job. Like most students, he had left his application to the last minute; the deadline was that day. He pulled out his “new friend,” ChatGPT. Within seconds, it spat answers out for him to use. With a little tweak here and there, and requests to sound more humorous and give some “real-life examples,” the application was sent out. What would have taken me an hour and a half, he’d done in about six minutes. He didn’t get the job, but it worried me that people were going to start trading integrity for efficiency en masse.

Delegating my work to a robot never appealed to me. Using it for school sounded like cheating. But in my second year, in an effort to understand the growing buzz, I plugged in the prompt, “Write about the Palace of Versailles and its significance to King Louis XIV,” something I’d been learning about in my early modern history course. Almost immediately, ChatGPT spat out more than 800 words that touched on divine power, absolute monarchy and ideological symbolism. I was shocked. To write something like that would’ve taken me a whole evening—and AI had done it in about four seconds.

I quickly understood how easy it was to abuse an option like this. Having the power to produce work in seconds is obviously tempting—which is also why it made me want to run as far away from it as possible. A slope like that was way too slippery to dabble with. Upon closer reading of ChatGPT’s work, I also realized it wasn’t very good. While it was clear, concise and thematic, it lacked insightful analysis and didn’t have a single citation, quotation or source. I couldn’t have found a better reason to stay off the website for good. Everyone else kept using it.

Today, I see symptoms of chatbots everywhere: em dashes are popping up on emails, club posts and breakup texts, as if the world discovered new punctuation overnight.........

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