Letters to the Editor: ChatGPT EDU is an 'embarrassment'

To the editor: How can USC even claim to be a school if it provides cheating tools to student and requires teachers to accommodate their use? I’m paying $100,000 a year for a quality education, not a degree mill. USC purchasing ChatGPT for students is an embarrassment.

— Margaret D., undergraduate

To the editor:

Dear Student,

I am pleased to announce that USC has decided to spend undisclosed sums of your tuition dollars on a premium version of ChatGPT. We hope that this will encourage you to outsource complex intellectual effort to this energy-intensive but extremely efficient plagiarism machine, while at the same time ensuring that the money we have saved by firing over 1,000 staff members in 2025, including (human) student advisers, will not be wasted on hiring or retaining world-class faculty to educate you and advance human knowledge. The CEO of OpenAI is thrilled about this exciting new initiative. We hope you will be too. To get started,

1. Use your USC NetID to log in here.

2. Resist the understandable impulse to ask questions.

3. Turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream…

— Alexandre R., faculty

To the editor: Upper administration seems unaware of the growing research across the country showing resistance to chatbots being deployed in higher educational contexts — something that apparently the majority of students and faculty are against, some studies have shown.

The resistance is building in and beyond USC at American campuses — not just to this particular kind of managerial decision made with seemingly no concern for the meat and texture of what research and teaching are about (basically: human, not algorithm based!) but also with little concern for how faculty and students (even those who are experts) feel about having it introduced willy nilly into USC’s teaching environment.

There is a very active group discussion among faculty on what this means for research and teaching. This is the kind of conversation USC administrators should have embraced and fostered before paying for a chatbot package (in the face of firing many faculty and staff). They should be (in this as in all things) following faculty, not dictating to us.

— Amelia J., professor

To the editor: Personally I will never use it. There is enough research on LLMs being uniquely bad for the planet and AIs hallucinating information to justify why, in my opinion, I think it was a stupid purchase on behalf of the school which is clearly already financially struggling (or at least behaving like it is), and it’s grim that so many professors and faculty were laid off so USC could buy thousands of ChatGPT subscriptions.

Finally, I think this is a fatal blow to writing essays as homework. Instead, I predict professors will shift to grading students on in-class participation, presentations, group work, and creative projects.

— Julian A., undergraduate

From the editor: In my time at USC, I have used AI tools to do the following:

• Code scripts to analyze logs that exposed police who were illegally sharing surveillance data with ICE

• Comb through reams of autopsies of fentanyl overdose victims

• Code a legal database that uncovered previously unknown lawsuits against an alleged sex offender

• Build a website that makes USC crime data accessible to the community

• Proofread and help craft subject lines for Morning, Trojan, which is an essential source of USC news for some 11,000 subscribers

Many students cannot afford the expensive chatbot subscriptions needed to execute these complex tasks — not to mention the years of experimenting it can take to get there.

Students who want to cheat already are. Free chatbots can write essays, summarize readings, and perform the everyday tasks of run-of-the-mill cheaters. Professors, if you see a new deterioration in the intellectual curiosity of your students, please let me know.

ChatGPT EDU’s benefits — access to high-end models, advanced data analytics, upgraded messaging limits, and “robust” security controls — appear to be more of a boon for serious users than lazy undergraduates in general ed courses.

Critics are justifiably upset. They note that USC has signaled institutional approval of a technology that is upending the traditional college classroom, apparently without sufficient faculty buy-in. Others raise legitimate questions about cost, although I wonder if they similarly scrutinize our HBO Max access (and many other enterprise subscriptions).

Still, I’m excited. USC has ensured that every student can experiment with the technology reshaping the workforce they will enter. And it has given license to its most curious students and faculty to continue advancing public knowledge.

— Tomo Chien, undergraduate

Our letter to the editor series serves as a public forum for readers debating controversial and newsworthy topics. Tomo Chien can be reached at [email protected].