One of the silver linings of the boom of LLM AI's such as ChatGPT is the very sudden demise of one of the worst companies in existence, Chegg. From the Wall Street Journal:
Since ChatGPT’s launch, Chegg has lost more than half a million subscribers who pay up to $19.95 a month for prewritten answers to textbook questions and on-demand help from experts. Its stock is down 99% from early 2021, erasing some $14.5 billion of market value. Bond traders have doubts the company will continue bringing in enough cash to pay its debts.
During the height of the COVID pandemic, when college courses were suddenly thrown into all-online mode overnight and without warning, the existence of Chegg alone probably wasted about half of my (and others') time in that era. Student cheating on tests and assignments was rampant. I personally had to invent a variety of breadcrumbs and traps to detect students cheating on exams in my programming and discrete mathematics courses. In particular: I had to make every single question delivered to students in online tests unique in some way, such that when they turned up on Chegg, I could look back and determine who had uploaded it. I had dozens of academic integrity cases filed at that time (all of which I'm required to investigate myself), and numerous students on the cusp of being expelled (and as a consequence, possibly even deported).
It was grim and awful and dispiriting all around, and I can't help but blame the corrupt offer made by Chegg to provide such support for cheating at college courses.
But it's also a garbage product, often with garbage answers, as is evidence by the fact that it may be the first business to almost instantaneously get wiped from the face of the Earth by the arrival of ChatGPT.
Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign conducted a study in the spring last year to see how ChatGPT had influenced cheating in an introductory programming course. They found students had overwhelmingly moved to ChatGPT from what the researchers called “plagiarism hubs” such as Chegg.
“It appeared that they completely shifted over from trying to find online solutions and copying them to just going to ChatGPT and having it generate solutions for them,” said Craig Zilles, professor of computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
The Chegg spokeswoman said, “We take any attempt to misuse our platform extremely seriously, cooperate with official university investigations into allegations of cheating and invest in our technology and solutions to prevent such actions.” OpenAI declined to comment.
Regarding this last claim from the Chegg spokeswoman -- it is in my experience (no surprise), a prevarication. Initially (circa 2020), Chegg would actually respond to investigation inquiries from a faculty member like myself, returning information on a posted question such as time of upload, location, IP address, and the like. However, within a year, they began to require sign-off on requests from the school's chief academic officer -- a very large logistical problem at many institutions. A year or so after that they squeezed off the detailed responses (no more time, location, IP address, etc.), making the responses effectively useless. In theory they offered a web form to submit possibly bulk DMCA requests to remove test questions to which we owned copyright, but that tool was perpetually broken, and no one could say how to use it; so again, another essentially fake offer on the integrity front.
The whole operation at Chegg is, in my opinion, predicated on deceptive practices -- in its business offerings, in its business case, and (as seen here) in its business practices. Not that ChatGPT has been a boon to education, but in this case, its complete and total wipeout of Chegg couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.
