FWIW, I fed ChatGPT an essay prompt from my Intro to Ethics class that many of my students find challenging and it spat out a passable response. I then fed it my rubric and asked it to grade the essay and it gave itself a B+. It graded generously; if a student had turned in that essay, I probably would have assigned it a B, maybe a B-. Students who aren’t aiming for an A will find it a satisfactory tool.
And from the fact that our asynchronous online sections are fully enrolled for the spring and in person sections are only 25% enrolled, I’m guessing that students already know that it pays to avoid settings in which we can have oral exams or in class writing.

Another interesting issue related to Staffel’s point about cleaning up one’s own text: ELL students could use it to improve grammar, style, etc. It’s a bit light spell check on steroids. Sometimes instructors struggle with deciding whether to mark down for bad grammar, typos, etc.–a common issue in universal design discussions, for example. Marking down might not seem fair for ELL students who’s content is understandable and good (clearly sometimes the content is not understandable, too). Now, one might say that best practice is to not grade down like that, but a lot of instructors do, and the AI can even improve organization and road mapping. So this use of ChatGPT might be beneficial. On the other hand, if the learning goal requires working on multiple drafts of one’s writing to improve it, this sort of use of ChatGPT might be an impediment to learning. Spell checker isn’t improving my ability to spell, but it does improve the spelling on the finished product.