ChatGPT

Exam rooms are wonderfully unsentimental. They do not care whether a model has a charming interface, a dramatic launch story, or a fan base that treats benchmark tables like sports scores. They ask a question, demand an answer, and mark it right or wrong. That makes professional licensing exams tempting AI benchmarks. A pharmacist licensure exam, in particular, looks like a clean test of whether a large language model can handle the kind of knowledge society actually cares about: drugs, laws, prescriptions, clinical judgment, and the delicate art of not confidently recommending something dangerous. Minor detail. ...

Work gets finished. The deck is sharper, the spreadsheet less embarrassing, the email sounds as though it passed through an adult, and the analyst who was supposed to spend three hours wrestling with a problem now appears serenely productive after forty minutes with ChatGPT. This is the managerial dream version of AI: not replacing people, merely making them better. A polite fiction, but a useful one. ...

TL;DR for operators ChatGPT did not fail the writing task in this study. The humans did something more interesting: when allowed to use it, they reported doing less of the mentally expensive work. The paper randomly assigned 40 participants to write a short argumentative essay either with ChatGPT 3.5 or without assistance. After the task, participants completed a four-item cognitive engagement scale covering deep understanding, effortful thinking, sustained attention, and exploration of alternative approaches. The ChatGPT group scored lower: 2.95 versus 4.19 on a five-point scale, with a statistically significant group effect. ...