Name: The Real Danger Of ChatGPT
Uploaded: 2026-01-20T17:43:11.000Z
Duration: 6 min 42 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

The last few weeks, ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence chatbot built by OpenAI, has been on an ambitious killing spree.

Timelines overflow with eulogies to its victims, search engines, copywriters, coders, high school essays, and many more.

Now, reports of these impending deaths may be exaggerated.

Human beings love to write the words the this will change everything, only to shrug a year later when this changed very little.

ChatGPT might be a game changer, it might not be.

Either way, the bot is undeniably impressive.

What really astounds is its rhetorical muscle, its ability to generate paragraphs of coherent argument or narrative.

Obviously, there are several million humans to which it can't hold a candle in this regard, but

it instantly hurdled several million others landing somewhere in the neighborhood of a high school student who's perfectly happy with a B minus on their Pride and Prejudice book report.

Twenty years ago, that was my neighborhood.

If I had access to ChatGPT in 10th grade English, I would have used it without compunction.

Why waste a perfectly good afternoon scratching out a five paragraph essay on Austin's depictions of social class when I could generate this in seconds?

In America, we don't call this cheating, we call it working smarter.

Maybe we'll outsource writing to ChatGPT like we outsourced math to calculators, spelling to spell check, memory to the Internet.

To a certain extent, the prevalence of essay writing in school reflects the decline of memorization as a method of teaching and learning, a decline that feels inevitable, maybe even appropriate, in a world where the totality of human knowledge is pocket sized.

We assign essays because they allow teachers to gauge a deeper understanding in their students.

They require a personal synthesis of information, which can't be outsourced to a machine, or couldn't be until a few weeks ago.

Pretty soon English teachers are going to get that question math teachers have been getting for decades.

When when will we ever need this stuff in real life?

The truth is that you'll probably never have to calculate a definite integral once you leave school.

And the truth is, we'll likely outsource many categories of basic writing to AI and never look back for other, more complex kinds of writing.

You could Simply start with ChatGPT, let it provide the basic structure, then edit to your liking.

Editing, after all, is to synthesize information.

Maybe ours will become a culture of editors, tweakers, embellishers.

The insipid teenage me would probably say no, but

the 34 year old me, the one who ironically became a professional essayist, leans the opposite way.

The difference between writing and editing is like the difference between writing and reading.

Obviously it closes the gaps of our ignorance and expands our knowledge, but

it does so through the language of others their words, their sentences, their narratives and arguments.

Editing, too, begins with the language of someone else.

Of course, to some extent, writing is editing too.

We inherit our language and its rules from culture, from from the past.

We express ourselves through a system that we didn't invent, but

that system is so infinitely flexible that we can use it to create structures of our own.

Language is how human beings understand themselves and the world, but writing is how we understand uniquely.

Not to write is to live according to the language of others, or worse, to live through edits, tweaks, and

embellishments to language generated by an overconfident AI chatbot.

I doubt this argument would convince the teenage me to resist a free magic tool that promises easy grades for less work.

As ever, it's left to teachers to impassion their students within a system that prioritizes grades over learning.

even when they don't, they still do the heroic work of giving insipid high schoolers like myself basic writing competence.

In my 20s, when I began to wonder who I really was and what I really believed questions that come for all of us, I discovered that writing structuring language of my own was the only way to find out.

That's when the foundation teachers work so hard to give me proved its immense value.

I hope future generations have a similar foundation.

One way or another, new writing is on its way from the future.

To make sense of all of us, I think we'll prefer it to be our own.

Thank you so much for watching this whole year.

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Thanks again, and I'll see you guys in 2023.