Pros and Cons of ChatGPT for Students

ChatGPT’s popularity is soaring among high school and college students, with a recent survey showing 26% of teens aged 13-17 using it for schoolwork—double the 13% from 2023.

Yet, its widespread use raises a key question: is it benefiting or hindering students in the long term? Especially now, as its role in education grows.

Below, we’ll weigh the pros and cons of ChatGPT for students, beginning with its advantages.

The Advantages and Disadvantages of ChatGPT for Students

Here are the key pros and cons of using ChatGPT as a study aid:

Pros of Using ChatGPT

Let’s look at the key benefits of using ChatGPT as a study aid:

Quick Access to Information

One of the main benefits of using ChatGPT is that it provides you with quick access to relevant information. This might mean:

• Factual information (such as historical events or definitions)
• New perspectives
• Summaries of complex topics

While the results from a Google search (or another search engine) are generally better sources of truth, ChatGPT’s answers are often not far behind in certain cases. Its results also come with one big bonus: there’s no scrolling through the various results to find the most relevant information.

Instead, ChatGPT delivers targeted, easily digestible information that can save you a lot of time when it comes to studying and researching a topic.

Note: ChatGPT’s ability to provide quick access to information is very impressive. But because of its limitations, we’d recommend you still do your own research. At best, you’ll be gathering additional data and opinions. At worst, you’ll find that ChatGPT made some glaring errors, and you’ll avoid them from finding their way into your notes or work.

Summarize Complex Topics

Sometimes breaking a topic down into manageable pieces can help you better understand it and remember what you’ve learned.

ChatGPT is great at summarizing and explaining complex topics. This means you don’t have to spend hours reading large volumes of information when you could gain an understanding of a topic faster and more easily.

Note: If you’re struggling to understand ChatGPT’s summaries, you can ask it to break down topics further. Give it as much information as possible about what you’re struggling with in the summary, and let it generate a response for you (with a simpler explanation or further detail). You can paraphrase the information ChatGPT provided for you in your own words, and then ask it to confirm your understanding, acting as a kind of tutor.

Learn New Skills Faster

It’s not just written information that ChatGPT can help you learn.

The intelligent language model can also help you pick up and practice new skills, or get better at a skill that you’re struggling with.

ChatGPT can help you with:

• Writing
• Developing code
• Learning a new language
• Communication skills
• Data analysis
• Understanding complex topics

Get Personalized Feedback

In the previous section, we saw above that ChatGPT offers feedback on a wide range of tasks, from writing to coding to speaking in different languages.

That means you don’t have to wait for a teacher or lecturer to review your work and provide feedback. You can instantly find out what you’re doing well, and what you need to improve on.

By quickly correcting your mistakes in near-real time, ChatGPT can help you reinforce your understanding of a new topic or skill much more easily than waiting a week or more to hear back from your teacher.

ChatGPT also doesn’t get frustrated if you take a while to catch on to a concept or technique. It will patiently run through the same exercise with you as many times as you need, and reframe its responses to help you understand.

Improve Your Writing

ChatGPT helps improve your writing by reducing the amount of time students (and writers) spend on things like:

• Generating ideas (including developing arguments)
• Creating and editing drafts
• Rewriting sections of text
• Checking spelling and grammar

Use the AI tool to improve your writing by asking it to:

• Create an outline for your essay or article
• Generate a list of interesting topics to write about
• Formulate a title that’s engaging and accurate
• Write or rewrite your introduction
• Write or rewrite your entire article or email
• Provide more information on a topic (or less)
• Find statistics and facts to support your data
• Rewrite sections of your text in your voice
• Format information into simpler terms (for readability)
• Fix your spelling and grammar errors
• Suggest ways to improve your tone and sentence structure
• Creates citations and formats bibliographies

While it’s not a replacement for skills like critical or creative thinking, ChatGPT is a great writing tool for initial drafts and additional help with creating the kind of support materials you need to hone your writing.

Cons of Using ChatGPT

While ChatGPT can obviously be a great aid to your studies, it’s not without its downsides.

Inaccuracies and Hallucinations

Inaccuracies and hallucinations are one of the biggest concerns when it comes to using ChatGPT for any reason, not just studying.

The AI tool can generate inaccurate and misleading information.

Factual inaccuracies are referred to as hallucinations in the world of AI. They are pieces of information ChatGPT generates that sound legitimate but are often completely fabricated.

ChatGPT also fails to mention when there are multiple perspectives about a topic, leading to the possibility that only one side of a topic or argument is being shared with you (and potentially passing that along in your writing or thinking).

There are various reasons why ChatGPT struggles with inaccuracies, such as:

• ChatGPT’s knowledge cutoff date is set to 2021. This means any events or new information that have occurred since then won’t be included in your responses. It’s worth noting that OpenAI’s GPT-4 knowledge cutoff is 2023, but you’ll need a paid ChatGPT Plus version to access this.
• ChatGPT struggles with regional differences. When asked about rural American culture, for example, it can only present stereotypes of the culture as it’s not familiar with the intricacies and regional differences of a culture.

These inaccuracies can have a negative impact on your academic performance, making it incredibly important to fact-check any piece of information ChatGPT provides.

Potential Privacy Issues

OpenAI admits it could use your information to improve its services—not just with ChatGPT, but all its products.

If you use ChatGPT to generate and store your notes and summaries, this means your information is potentially being viewed by others.

This has further repercussions when it comes to ChatGPT storing any personally identifiable information (often unintentionally).

We suggest against inputting any personal information into this (or any) AI tool. This includes exam topics, results, and other templates.

Plagiarism Issues

Using ChatGPT can also lead to plagiarism risks, intentional or not. Since it generates text based on patterns from vast datasets, the content it produces might closely resemble existing works without proper attribution.

For instance, if you ask it to write an essay or summarize a topic, it could unintentionally pull phrases or ideas from copyrighted sources, which you might then submit as your own.

Academic institutions often use plagiarism detection tools like Turnitin, and while ChatGPT’s output might not always flag as direct copying, it can still lack originality—a red flag for professors.

Over-relying on it to complete assignments also bypasses the learning process, undermining your ability to develop critical thinking and writing skills.

To avoid trouble, always rephrase ChatGPT’s suggestions in your own words, cite any ideas that aren’t entirely yours (even if ChatGPT doesn’t provide sources), and use Humbot’s plagiarism checker to ensure your work is original and free of unintentional overlap. It's completely free to use!

You may also be interested in: ChatGPT and Plagiarism.

Negative Bias Towards Certain Topics

Another limitation of ChatGPT is that it can generate biased responses when asked about a topic.

This is because the data it was trained on is hugely biased. ChatGPT tends to reflect the biases present in its training data related to topics like AI ethics:

The AI was trained using information sourced from the internet (including book databases and Wikipedia). However, the data is known to be biased, largely because ChatGPT doesn’t fully understand the concepts of context and nuance.

ChatGPT also falls prey to certain biases that are key when learning a topic, such as:

• Subtractive bias: The tendency to reduce complex topics to their simplest explanations, such as the relationship between AI and its ethics.
• Confirmation bias: The tendency to only present information that supports the original claim or answer provided.
• Masculine default bias: The tendency for ChatGPT to mention women less than men.
• Positivity bias in subjective interpretation: The tendency for ChatGPT to include positive elements in its answers, whenever possible.

Another topic that ChatGPT is often negatively biased towards is itself. ChatGPT tends to present information about itself in a negative light, particularly its responses to model safety and AI hallucinations:

As AI technology develops, these biases will no doubt lessen and be eliminated. However, for now, it’s important to keep these biases in mind when using ChatGPT to learn a topic that’s open to interpretation or debate.

Academic Integrity Concerns

There are various concerns related to AI tools in academia and education. Related to ChatGPT, two concerns are about learning transferable soft skills and AI detection tools.

Soft Skills

Soft skills include the ability to think and express yourself in an organized, accurate, and interesting way.

However, relying too heavily on ChatGPT to generate text could result in you neglecting to practice soft skills like critical and creative thinking.

For example, while AI tools can create an essay that can pass academic checks like Turnitin, a ChatGPT-generated piece typically lacks originality, creativity, or unique insights.

This could lead to a negative impact on your academic performance when you miss out on developing these skills.

AI Detection Tool

Detecting when AI tools have been used to generate a piece of work or how much a student might have relied on AI tools is difficult.

While some AI-generated text can be picked up from clues like patterns in writing style and the AI’s ability to generate ideas or construct an argument, the more the student edits the work AI tools produce, the harder this detection becomes.

Due to the bias of AI models towards the topics mentioned above, these tools might misinterpret a student’s (or researcher’s) claim of the ethics of AI as a negative statement against the company they’re studying at. This might lead to the work being flagged as toxic.

If you’re concerned about the potential challenges of using ChatGPT affecting your study time, we advise checking on your school’s or university’s guidelines for its use. Many institutions are setting clear parameters regarding how much you should rely on AI tools for your academics.

Lack of Context Around Complex Topics

We’ve already seen that ChatGPT can summarize complex topics, but really complex topics that require extensive background reading to understand aren’t great candidates for ChatGPT.

When asked, ChatGPT only provides limited information and context around a topic as it can’t form much context outside of what you ask it for, and it isn’t able to connect information from multiple sources.

In particular, ChatGPT doesn’t include multiple perspectives in its answers, resulting in you potentially missing out on valuable insights into a topic you could gain from a Google search.

When it comes to understanding complex topics, we’d recommend you avoid using ChatGPT altogether. You won’t get the depth of context you need to fully understand these topics.

For example, you need to fully understand the context of “Huckleberry Finn.”

This means you need to understand the:

• Genre
• Characters
• Themes
• Writing style
• Plot
• Symbolism

While you can definitely get a good idea of the above elements of this novel from AI tools, reading the book means you’ll fully understand its nuances and use of bigger concepts like symbolism more deeply.

This also improves your understanding of similar books, films, and other complex pieces of literature and art.

Final Thoughts: The Benefits and Risks of ChatGPT for Students

ChatGPT could be a helpful tool to rely on for studying. It has the potential to help you learn more about your course material. Or confirm whether the information you already have on a certain topic is accurate.

But it isn’t perfect. It won’t always “know” the answer. It isn’t always accurate when it does give you an answer. And it might not have enough context to generate answers that make sense for you and your learning style.

Therefore, you shouldn’t use ChatGPT as your “one-stop shop” for study materials. Preferably, the best way to learn is to use it alongside a textbook. Or other study material your teacher has approved.

Overall, if you use ChatGPT solely to learn on its own, it could limit your potential to absorb the key concepts you need to know ahead of an exam.