As technology advances, you can always count on one thing: students will use it to avoid doing homework. One industrious student not only got an AI chatbot to do their homework assignment, but they also rigged it to a 3D printer to write it out on pen and paper, expending the maximum amount of effort required to do the minimum amount of homework. Bravo!

TikTok user 3d_printer_stuff shared a series of videos on how they programmed a 3D printer to produce homework with the answers that ChatGPT wrote. 

They gave ChatGPT their assignment; it spit out an answer, and then they copy/pasted that text over to 3dwriter. As you can see, once you sort out the proper spacing and mount a pen onto your 3D printer, 3dwriter can write out the AI-generated text onto a sheet of paper perfectly between the margins. The tutorial video shows the process step-by-step. 

ChatGPT has been in the news recently after Microsoft said it would invest $10 billion in OpenAI. The company developed an AI chatbot that scrapes the internet to produce long-form answers to questions in a human-like fashion. This is exactly why ChatGPT has already been banned in New York City public schools over cheating and plagiarism concerns. Ultimately the fear is that students will use it as a crutch and hinder the development of critical thinking skills, which is why the NYC Dept. of Education restricted access to the AI chatbot on its schools’ computers. I don’t blame them, considering one of the videos shows math homework being done on the fly. 

@3d_printer_stuff

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Of course, as many comments suggest, the next logical step in 3d_printer_stuff’s scheme should be to train an AI to mimic their handwriting. That way, they could fool a teacher since the handwriting shown here is just a little too perfect. You could also use these tools for non-cheating purposes, I guess.

I’d argue that setting up a rig to do your homework takes more time than just doing the homework yourself, but I applaud the hustle nonetheless. 

Either way, it’s interesting to see what the cross-section of AI and automation can produce that doesn’t involve it being “light outs for us all,” according to one CEO. I nor PC Gamer endorse cheating or scamming your way out of doing homework. We do think it’s cool, though.