This past July, Maya Bodnick ’26 wrote an article titled “ChatGPT Goes to Harvard” for former Indy member Matthew Yglesias’s ’03 Substack SlowBoring. Bodnick feed ChatGPT essay prompts from all eight of her classes and asked her professors and TAs to grade the resulting writing as they would any other student. At the end of the year, the AI earned a cumulative GPA of 3.57.
Despite ChatGPT’s strong performance with Bodnick’s course load, it is not—and should not be regarded as a catch-all for school assignments. Not only does ChatGPT-generated writing sound formulaic and tone-deaf, it also fails to sufficiently solve basic math problems. When mathematician David H. Bailey asked ChatGPT to prove four well-known mathematical theorems, it came up zero-for-four. Moreover, claiming GPT-produced work as one’s own exposes myriad ethical issues, from both outright plagiarism to a disregard for the work of professors and school administrators.
Despite these drawbacks, ChatGPT is a powerful and revolutionary tool that can be adopted for positive use. By working within Harvard’s guidelines—which primarily call for academic integrity and safety from phishing—for generative AI, there are a couple acceptable ways to use generative AI models like ChatGPT to improve your learning experience at Harvard.
The first possible way to take advantage of ChatGPT is through supplementary summaries (not replacements) for course readings. Last semester, I took a Philosophy class on the history of human ethics. The assigned readings for the course were lengthy, dense, and often difficult to understand. Aversion from these readings was no option either, as it was part of the course to learn how to interpret sections of texts like Confuscius’s The Analects and Kant’s The Metaphysics of Morals. Additionally, each class began with a brief quiz on the assigned readings.
Here is where ChatGPT comes in. The service was trained on a wide range of texts written before 2021 and had already processed numerous passages about the texts I was assigned, allowing it to compile both a general overview and more thorough analysis. After I completed the readings for each class, the summaries that ChatGPT provided sufficient information to help me better comprehend what I had read and help me follow along in lectures. It could confirm whether or not my own interpretations of the text aligned with the authors’, or if not, I could offer a new perspective to class discussions.
One of my other courses last semester was Hist-Lit 10: Introduction to American Studies. The course’s only graded assignments were two 1000-word essays and a 3500-word paper, all three of which had vague prompts that made meeting a word count difficult. Such open-ended questions are often difficult to answer without external perspectives initiating idea flows, making way for the perfect opportunity for an AI chatbot. When asking ChatGPT about questions similar to my essay topic, it would suggest a list of ideas where I could start my research. Reading the list of ideas felt like talking with students about their ideas, and even if I would deviate from the GPT-generated responses, they often helped me get over writer’s block.
ChatGPT’s utility when writing essays does not end there. Students can provide GPT-3.5, a subset of the model that can better understand language, with a starting point to direct its users to possible and relevant sources, ranging from newspaper articles to research papers. While the sources provided by ChatGPT are in no way a finalized list (and students should most definitely investigate their legitimacy, accuracy, and relevance), it can pose as an encyclopedia again, directing students to expand their research.
Students can successfully use ChatGPT to clarify concepts learned in the lecture. In a similar manner as a tutoring session, ChatGPT can act as a platform to listen to follow-up questions or a soundboard for new ideas. During a previous statistics course, I found myself confusing which situations—stories, as my professor called them—called for which formulas. I used ChatGPT to walk through example problems, and many of the generative AI’s explanations were on par with those in the textbook. Other possible uses for the technology include explaining economics concepts, language conjugations, and generally making study materials and time more efficient.
All of this is not to say that you should use ChatGPT to avoid readings or cram for tests. I was able to use it to become a more efficient student, not to cheat. I believe that, if used wisely, we can greatly improve class curriculums, grading styles, and the processes we’ve traditionally used to comprehend material without as much information so readily available. I encourage you to do the same—instead of straying away from GPT out of fear for its abilities, embrace it, and see how it can help your experience at Harvard, too.
Jonah Karafiol ’26 (jonahkarafiol@college.harvard.edu) writes Forum for the Independent.