ChatGPT thinks for me, therefore I am

A teacher caught students using ChatGPT on their first assignment to introduce themselves. When the assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Arkansas shared the experience on X, formerly Twitter, in a post that has now garnered 3.5 million views, some replies argued that students would obviously combat “busywork” assignments with similarly low-effort, AI-generated answers.

The professor said that the assignment was not only to help students get acquainted with using the online Blackboard discussion-board feature, but that she was also “genuinely curious” about the answers. However, the AI-written responses did not reflect her expectations, and since they were mostly similar, it was clear they were generated by ChatGPT or a similar chatbot.

Many of the commenters who defended using AI compared ChatGPT for writing to using a calculator for math problems. But the professor said that viewing LLMs as just another problem-solving tool is a “mistaken” comparison, especially in the context of humanities. While calculators reduce the time needed to solve mechanical operations that students are already taught to produce a singular correct solution, the aim of humanities education is not to create a product but to “shape people” by “giving them the ability to think about things that they wouldn’t naturally be prompted to think about.”

But how would ChatGPT know so much about a user to even be able to reply to the question “who am I?” Well, as a ChatGPT user, I got curious about what it knows about me and asked it to write the essay. It is no surprise that, like other SaaS applications, ChatGPT saves a variety of user data, including device data, usage data, log data, account information, and user content.

Prompt:
Answer: