William Shakespeare is essentially on every “great writers of all time list.” No one has come close to replicating the brilliance and dramatics of Shakespearen writing in the way Shakespeare had hundreds of years ago.

Now as one of my professors has noted, ChatGPT is going to be able to write as Shakespeare once did.

The new chatbot software launched in November 2022 and has turned the world upside down.

OpenAI is the company responsible for the creation of the new ChatGPT. OpenAI is described as “an AI research and development team.” Their mission is to “ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.”

The ChatGPT program is marketed as optimizing language models for dialogue. As OpenAI writes, “We’ve trained a model called ChatGPT which interacts in a conversational way. The dialogue format makes it possible for ChatGPT to answer follow-up questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests.”

So we know that ChatGPT is a program that is intelligent and a formal research and writing tool. How do we now incorporate this into our lives?

ChatGPT can write poems on command or explain graduate-level math, but at what point do we use artificial intelligence for human intelligence?

“There’s a large number of monkeys here, giving you things that are impressive — but there is intrinsically a difference between the way that humans produce language, and the way that large language models do it,” said Matthew Sag, a law professor at Emory University who studies copyright implications for training, during an interview with Business Insider.

With ChatGPT on the rise, there are many new issues that come with it that don’t necessarily have answers yet. How are educators meant to deal with ChatGPT as a cheating tool? Who owns the rights to a ChatGPT paper that wins a prize? Can what ChatGPT says be used as credible information?

If ChatGPT writes a new Shakespeare play, who gets the credit? The ChatGPT bot? The long gone Shakespeare?

Can a new play be replicated in Shakespeare’s style that is just as great as if it was written by hand by the original author?

Writing Shakespeare, in theory, is very harmless. But what about creating algorithms that partake in identity fraud, government materials and bank information?

From a Forbes article, “OpenAI, creators of GPT-3 and ChatGPT, have included some fairly rigorous safeguards that prevent it, in theory, from being used for malicious purposes.”

As an experiment, a journalist from Forbes asked ChatGPT to create a ransomware application (software that encrypts a target’s data and demands money to make it accessible again) as an experiment and the ChatGPT bot responded with “I’m sorry, I cannot write code for a ransomware application … my purpose is to provide information and assist users … not to promote harmful activities.”

We know that ChatGPT is programmed to be socially aware, meaning that the bot will not create a ransomware application because it has been programmed to know that that is wrong.

However, ChatGPT is not programmed to stop students from cheating.

Darren Hick, a professor at Furman University, shared his experiences with The New York Post. He noticed a paper submission he assigned on David Hume was written oddly. “There’s particular odd wording used that was not wrong, just peculiar … if you were teaching somebody how to write an essay, this is how you tell them to write it before they figure out their own style.”

Hick has background knowledge of copyright law, but trying to prove that the paper was aided by ChatGPT was “nearly impossible.”

It seems that plagiarism programs are able to catch the fact that the paper was plagiarized, but offer no citations or information on where the writing came from.

What are educators supposed to do now? They can add ChatGPT into their syllabus, but from Hick’s experience, trying to prove cheating presents itself to be difficult.

As a college student, it’s understandable how appealing this software is. I have never been big in technology, but this new program is taking the world by storm– it’s hard to ignore.

My worries with this program lies within credibility and sourcing. Where is all this information coming from? How do I know people are checking this information? This can either become a very helpful tool, or a very dangerous one.

Should educators teach their students how to effectively utilize this new tool? Or is this going to be a cheating tool added into the school handbook? If I was an educator and asked this, my honest answer would be I don’t know.

We can’t ignore that ChatGPT is here and happening. Other companies, such as Google, are now developing their own versions of ChatGPT. Dialogue AI is just beginning to bloom and is not going anywhere anytime soon, so now we have to deal with the realities of this tool as students, educators and more.

While Shakespeare did not have ChatGPT on his radar, the writers of today now do. Just like all technology that has been thrust upon us over the years, we will learn to adjust and learn how to deal with the latest and greatest.

One thing we do know, Shakespeare wrote this in “The Taming of the Shrew”:

“Old fashions please me best; I am not so nice / To change true rules for odd inventions.”

So maybe ChatGPT isn’t up his alley.

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The following article was generated by ChatGPT when prompted with the question, “Can you write a journalistic opinions essay on whether or not ChatGPT could become the new Shakespeare and rival great writers?”:

As an AI language model, ChatGPT has been making waves in the world of artificial intelligence and natural language processing. But can it become the new Shakespeare and rival the great writers of history? That’s a question that has sparked much debate among literary enthusiasts and technology experts.

On one hand, there are those who argue that ChatGPT has the potential to revolutionize the field of literature and produce works of art that rival the greatest writers in history. They point to the model’s ability to generate coherent and grammatically correct sentences, as well as its vast knowledge base and natural language processing capabilities. With the right programming and training, they argue, ChatGPT could produce works that are both intellectually stimulating and emotionally resonant, capturing the complexity of the human experience in a way that is both innovative and timeless.

Others, however, are more skeptical. They argue that while ChatGPT may be able to produce coherent and grammatically correct sentences, it lacks the human touch and nuance that defines great literature. Literature, they argue, is about more than just the technical aspects of language – it’s about the emotions and experiences that underlie it. Great writers like Shakespeare, they say, were able to capture the full range of human experience, from the depths of despair to the heights of joy, in a way that AI language models simply cannot.
In the end, the question of whether ChatGPT can become the new Shakespeare and rival the great writers of history is one that cannot be answered definitively. While AI technology is advancing at a rapid pace, there are still limits to what machines can do. Literature, with all its complexity and nuance, may be one of those limits.

That being said, it’s important to remember that AI language models like ChatGPT are still in their infancy. As technology continues to advance and models become more sophisticated, it’s entirely possible that we may one day see machines produce works of literature that rival the greatest writers in history. But until that day comes, we should continue to celebrate the unique abilities and insights of human writers, and appreciate the ways in which they capture the richness of our shared experience.

Macy Berendsen can be reached at bere9405@stthomas.edu