(funky music) ♪ I'm going down south by going have myself a time.

♪ - [Jason] The adult cartoon, "South Park," a mainstay on Comedy Central for the last 26 years.

The show has evolved from the escapades of four crude, foulmouthed kids to one that makes fun of celebrities and provides social commentary on current events and issues.

- We want privacy!

We want privacy!

- [Jason] This season, the show delved into the topic of artificial intelligence and its newest wonder, ChatGPT.

- ChatGPT?

- Yeah, dude.

There's a bunch of apps and programs you can subscribe to.

They use open AI to do all your writing for you.

People use 'em to write poems, write job applications.

- [Jason] Owned and developed by Open AI, a leading artificial intelligence research company, ChatGPT generates human-like replies to questions.

The new technology has been making countless headlines since its November release.

Denounced by many as a free essay writing, test taking tool that makes it super easy for students to cheat on writing assignments.

- Because it came on like a tidal wave.

- It's inevitable.

This is like trying to keep the tides away or trying to keep the sand from being eroded on the beach.

We can't stop it.

- [Jason] The technology mimics the brain's ability to process information, drawing its responses from websites worldwide.

- So, you are just giving the artificial intelligence the parameters and saying, go.

- Write a poem about the sun, like according to Edgar Allen Poe or something.

And then it just wrote like this original poem.

- It's sort of taking over our brains for us in a way.

- [Jason] Central Piedmont Community College, Professor of Information Technology, D.I.

Von Briesen, is fascinated by ChatGPT.

During our visit, he asked it to create various artistic images, as well as a letter of recommendation for me.

- Jason is a talented writer who's able to distill a complex, distill complex information in the clear and engaging prose.

I can't write like that!

I mean, I could.

It would take a while, right?

He has a knack for crafting compelling narratives that make complex topics accessible to a wide audience while maintaining the rigor and accuracy that is essential to good journalism.

Jason, I love you already.

- [Jason] And therein lies part of the problem.

Because it's pulling from all sorts of websites, what ChatGPT spits out may or may not be factually accurate, leaving many to wonder where's it getting this information from?

- I'm so curious with just how it works, and how it thinks.

Like I'll just throw whatever I can at it and see what it, what it throws back at me.

- [Jason] Of course, having access to this sort of technology makes it very tempting for some students to want to take advantage of.

- And we also have another student who wrote a shockingly good paper.

This one's called a Feminist Neoliberal Perspective of Post-War Afghanistan by Eric Hartman.

- Ah, yes, thank you, thank you.

(ominous music) - It is very tempting, like because there's no way to check it, and it's very original, and it is also capable of citing sources.

- It's really the highest form of plagiarism, because ChatGPT is just this mastermind at pulling from written phrases, so nothing is original.

- Liz Rogers teaches English and journalism at Central Piedmont.

During her 30 plus years as an educator, she's seen it all, from the pre-internet days of students using Cliffs Notes and copying directly out of books to now using ChatGPT.

- And it worries me that the more, the easier it is for students to not create original work and to rely on some other source for doing it, they're not, they're cheating themselves, because they're not developing the skills.

- If too many people are doing that, we're gonna get a sort of generation of people that are not as articulate in creating their own words or their own ideas, concepts.

- This is just another tool, like Google's another tool, like the internet is another tool.

You can imagine how people started to feel about the internet when it first came on from an academic perspective.

You don't have to go to the library?

Remember the card catalog?

You don't have to go do the stacks and get the book.

Some people are like, woohoo!

Other people are like, oh, that's just terrible.

Kids don't know how to research anymore.

And then we move on to Google, which sort of stepped up the game for search engines, and now we're at the next step of that.

It's not search engine, it's creation engine.

- [Jason] This spring Central Piedmont revised its academic integrity policy, adding AI generated content as a no-no, unless a professor says it's okay and students cite its use as a source.

- All of the schools are freaking out.

Some of them want to band it entirely.

- Their normal detection software that teachers are using, like tab switching, all this different thing, it's gonna be very, very difficult for them to actually determine if this was AI generated or the student wrote this.

- It's just a shame that we have to bog it down with a chase for accuracy and integrity.

It should just be a given.

- You know, do we just give paper tests, you know, pencil on paper, and then we have to manually grade that now?

Because that's the only way to confirm that you really know it.

- [Jason] Technically not intended for children under 18, students in Charlotte Mecklenburg schools do not have access to ChatGPT on their school issued Chromebooks.

- We can block it in our district, but it isn't gonna be blocked on a personal device.

- [Jason] But CMS Chief Technology Officer, Candace Salmon-Hosey is taking a wait and see approach towards it, while getting feedback from teachers and administrators.

- Our instructors and our instructors and our staff can use this product to benefit and to augment and enhance the lessons that they're working on.

- [Jason] Salmon-Hosey isn't rushing to judgment of ChatGPT, mainly because she's seen this type of thing before, back when many districts banned websites, such as YouTube and Wikipedia, which are now each widely regarded as valuable learning resources.

- You can use this product for creative lessons, for group work, to create more engagement and reflective practices, to talk about the process of learning how to write.

- [Jason] The world is ever changing.

So too is technology and the way we gather and process information.

- Fighting the technology is just kind of going the wrong direction.

But that doesn't answer the question of what we do about it.

- [Jason] But what we do with that information is still being analyzed and figured out.

- AI is gonna be a part of what we do, just like the internet is a part of what we do, and we're going to, we need to learn how to live with it.

- [Jason] And time will certainly tell how this latest technology will be or won't be put to use.

For "Carolina Impact," I'm Jason Terzis reporting.