There’s a new way to do your English homework, and it’s not paying a professor to write your essays for you—it’s better. ChatGPT is a new chatbot created by OpenAI, and it is being hailed as a savior by students at all levels. Ask it to write a movie about the James Webb telescope encountering little green men from Mars, and you’ve got yourself a Spielberg-worthy screenplay within seconds. Math word problems? No challenge for GPT. It can speak any language, decipher slang, and understand you even if you ask it a question with grammatical errors. Any assignment a teacher might give can be cracked by ChatGPT.

I asked the AI to give me a plot for a sequel to The Great Gatsby, except taking place in the year 2100. Here is its response: 

Title: Gatsby 2100

It is the year 2100, and the world has changed dramatically since the roaring twenties. Technology has advanced to the point where virtual reality has become a fully immersive experience, and people can live out their wildest dreams in digital worlds. However, in this future society, wealth and power still reign supreme.

The story follows the great-grandson of Jay Gatsby, a man named Jack Gatsby, who is a tech entrepreneur and billionaire. Jack lives a lavish lifestyle in a sprawling mansion on the outskirts of a futuristic city. He spends his days immersed in virtual reality and throwing extravagant parties, just like his great-grandfather did a century earlier.

But Jack is haunted by the legacy of his family. He feels an emptiness that no amount of wealth or technology can fill. In an attempt to find purpose and meaning in his life, Jack becomes obsessed with a woman named Ava, a brilliant scientist who is working on cutting-edge technology that could change the world. Ava is everything Jack wants in a partner, but she is not interested in his wealth and is focused solely on her work.

As Jack tries to win over Ava, he becomes embroiled in a web of intrigue and deception that threatens to destroy everything he has built. He discovers that his business empire is built on corruption and exploitation, and that his own family history is a lie. With the help of Ava and a group of idealistic young activists, Jack must confront the darker side of his legacy and find a way to use his wealth and power for good.

Gatsby 2100 explores themes of wealth, power, technology, and the search for meaning in a rapidly changing world. It is a thrilling and thought-provoking story that pays homage to the classic novel while taking it in exciting new directions.

Needless to say, GPT is an incredibly powerful tool, and yet it still only demonstrates the beginning of the potential of artificial intelligence. Ten years down the line, AI will be doing things we can’t even dream of. Because of AI’s vast capabilities, there is a question to be asked: Will it undermine academic integrity? For example: An English teacher assigns students to read a passage and summarize it, with its most important quotes, main ideas, themes, and literary devices. A student could spend an hour working on this assignment… or they could simply copy and paste it into ChatGPT, and ask it to answer for them. The latter takes maybe a minute to do, and is virtually undetectable. It’s a scary thought for teachers and professors around the world, my school included.

My engineering teacher has brought it up on multiple occasions. For that specific class, we are tasked with designing a rubber band launcher made from wooden sticks, hot glue, thread, and foam core. We have been given half the semester to design something using those materials, capable of shooting a rubber band the length of two tables. At the beginning of the project, my teacher mentioned the new AI, ChatGPT, to the class. He spoke about how great it is for industry and technology, but not for students or others who are learning. He said something that stuck with me: “Doing it yourself is the best opportunity to learn.” I could just go online and ask the AI for a good design that I can use, but this would not really help me academically in any way. Failing and learning is the only way I can better myself.

Besides all this, GPT has flaws. It is malleable, and not always right. For example, asking it the question, “What is 2+2?” would yield you the answer “4,” which is correct. However, if you tell GPT that it is wrong, it will believe you. It will retract its answer and agree that you are correct, even saying “2+2=5.” Beyond that, GPT is unable to do longer, complex math problems involving formulas. Giving the AI a longer mathematical problem that needs to be solved in steps greatly increases the risk that the AI will mess up somewhere in the solving process, and give you a wrong answer. Not being a “normal” computer very much changes the calculating abilities of ChatGPT. Since it is an AI, and gets it data from the internet as a whole, it is ultimately not any more reliable than a human being who spends a lot of time on the internet and believes everything they read.

Despite all that, however, GPT’s reliance on the internet as its source of information greatly improves its ability to “think,” and to solve both qualitative and quantitative problems. I could ask GPT to help me design an architectural floor plan, or to think of a way to easily build a bike out of the materials in my garage. This is the beauty of GPT: its ability to think beyond, to think outside the box, to imagine. No other computer has that, and this is why GPT is at once both the future and a threat to those who will create our future.

Now, who wants to go see Gatsby 2100 with me?