[Student Voices] One Extra Hour
Published: 18 Nov. 2024, 11:20
Seo Hyun Kim, Chadwick International
By Seo Hyun Kim, Chadwick International
I nervously typed my request into ChatGPT: “Can you please give me a short paragraph on the reasons I chose Taylor Swift’s ‘No Body, No Crime’ for my English assignment?” Yes, I said “please.” Being polite to the AI wouldn’t bring me a better answer, but I didn’t know that at the time. ChatGPT was new and mysterious. It was just starting to become a schoolwide topic. As I looked at the words this thing was generating, my nervousness rose. What had I just done?
English was one of my best classes. Moreover, it was one of my favorites. I was perfectly capable of reaching high marks without AI. And I knew my teacher wouldn’t like it. She would waste time evaluating and commenting on work I didn’t really care about. So I had decided to betray not only myself, but my teacher as well.
Why did I do it? I had my reasons. Work from one class was spilling into another. During English, I had to do theater work. During theater, I had to catch up on Chinese. During Chinese, I had to create a workout plan for PE. When class was done, I raced to the theater and prepared for the play: reading out lines from the missing actors, fixing actors’ costumes, finding a hundred missing props I knew I set up yesterday, looking for my jacket that went missing alongside them, shining a mirror that wasn’t shiny enough.
I don’t mean to suggest I’m the only one who’s busy. Everyone’s busy. That’s what makes ChatGPT so hard to resist, and that’s why I decided to use it. It gives us what we need most. Time.
In this case, I got one extra hour.
I thought about what this extra time had bought me. Should I scroll on Instagram for a while? Work on another assignment? Follow a weird urge to re-organize my entire room at midnight? Finally, I settled on something. I was going to make the pasta! Around this time, a feta cheese and cherry tomato pasta trend was in full swing on TikTok. I used an hour and a good block of Feta, then sat down to my meal. It was absolutely disgusting.
During the next school year, while having lunch with my English teacher and talking about pasta and internet trends, I told her about my ChatGPT assignment. I said I made a mistake. It had been eating away at me all this time. The guilt was too much to live with, and it felt liberating to finally come clean.
To my surprise, she told me that she knew all along.
with the Korea JoongAng Daily
To write comments, please log in to one of the accounts.
Standards Board Policy (0/250자)