PARIS: Know-it-all chatbots landed with a bang last year, convincing one engineer that machines had become sentient, spreading panic that industries could be wiped out, and creating fear of a cheating epidemic in schools and universities.
Alarm among educators has reached fever pitch in recent weeks over ChatGPT, an easy-to-use artificial intelligence tool trained on billions of words and a ton of data from the web.
It can write a half-decent essay and answer many common classroom questions, sparking a fierce debate about the very future of traditional education.
New York City’s education department banned ChatGPT on its networks because of “concerns about negative…