Is an ice cream sandwich a sandwich? How about a sushi roll, chicken wrap or sloppy joe? These were some of the prompts included in a classification and model-building assignment in the fall 2022 Knowledge-Based AI course that David Joyner taught at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

But when Joyner, executive director of online education and the online master of science in computer science and senior research associate, was scheduled to teach the course again in the spring 2023 semester, he reconsidered the assignment in the presence of ChatGPT—the OpenAI chat bot that burst onto the global stage in late 2022 and sent shock waves across academe. The bot interacts with users in a conversational way, including by answering questions, admitting its mistakes, challenging falsehoods and rejecting inappropriate requests.

“I’d used the questions for five years because they were fun questions,” Joyner said. “But ChatGPT’s answer was so precise that I’m pretty sure it was learning from my own best students,” whom he suspected had posted their work online. Joyner replaced several of the sandwich options with avocado toast, shawarma, pigs in a blanket, Klondike bar and Monte Cristo. He also updated the academic misconduct statement on his syllabus to “basically say that copying from ChatGPT isn’t different from copying from other people.” Such efforts, Joyner acknowledges, may be a temporary fix.