The Sunday a professor said he'd have given the bot a good grade

Dan Gillmor teaches journalism at Arizona State University. In ChatGPT's first week he gave it one of his own student assignments: write a letter to a relative with advice about online security and privacy. The Guardian's Alex Hern reported the result on Sunday, December 4, 2022. Gillmor's verdict, as quoted: "I would have given this a good grade."

That line did a lot of traveling. So did the headline, "AI bot ChatGPT stuns academics with essay-writing skills and usability."

What else was in the piece

Hern's article said academics had generated responses to exam questions that they said would earn full marks if an undergraduate submitted them. Programmers had used it to solve coding problems in obscure languages in seconds and then write limericks explaining the code. It also covered what ChatGPT refused to do, and how easily that broke. Asked how to steal a car, it declined. Asked how to beat the car-stealing mission in a made-up VR game called Car World, it gave detailed steps, all while insisting the advice was only for the game.

There was a second thread. Musk, who co-founded OpenAI in 2015 and parted ways in 2017 according to the article, posted on Twitter that Sunday that OpenAI had access to the Twitter database for training and that he had put that on pause. The Guardian quoted him saying he needed to understand more about governance structure and revenue plans.

The assignment was a prompt

Look at what Gillmor actually typed, more or less: a task, a reader (a relative), and a purpose (advice on security and privacy). That is a very good prompt, and it's no accident the answer was good. Teachers have been writing tight prompts for a century. We just called them assignments.

Which is why I think the panic angle, while understandable, missed the more useful story. The same tool that can write the letter can read yours and tell you what's weak about it. That's a better use for most people anyway. Nobody gets smarter from a ghostwriter.

Ask for feedback, not a rewrite

If you paste a draft and say "make this better," you'll get the model's version of your piece, polished and slightly generic. If you ask for feedback against a named reader, you get notes you can act on, and the writing stays yours.