It seems the latest thing to worry about in higher education is Chat GPT, an artificial intelligence software package that can write your term papers for you. Its free if you want to give it a try. I was curious about how well it can write a 3-paragraph essay. So I gave it a try.

The instructions I gave ChatGPT, were as follows:

“You are general manager of Enuf4All Organic Farm, a 55-acre business that grows vegetables and herbs.  The farm owner is preparing a quarterly newsletter to send to members and one of the articles needs to explain the value of growing tomatoes organically. Write a 3-paragraph newsletter article for me.”

The newsletter article I got was readable and really not too bad but when I evaluated it using the method described in our class, looking carefully at transitions between paragraphs, it wasn’t very good. Here is an example of how I would (quickly) evaluate the submission from ChatGPT.