ChatGPT Response Appears To Make It Into School Textbook—And We're Doomed

Students are being actively discouraged from using ChatGPT and other AI-generation tools, as they are expected to learn their educational concepts and be able to put them into practice. They are also not supposed to use these tools while writing papers or during at-home tests.

Given how expensive grade school and college textbooks are, it is reasonable that educational writers and content professionals should be held to the same standards. Wouldn't it make sense for them to use the knowledge of their field, rather than what's been fed into ChatGPT, to make a textbook a worthwhile purchase for students?

But it seems a textbook writer did not see it that way, at least while writing a unit on database management systems (DBMS).

On a page discussing the specific breakdown of data tables, regarding what's contained in rows and columns, Redditor imfrom_mars_ discovered a ChatGPT response to a prompt that hadn't been deleted from a textbook they're using.

Looking at the entirety of the page, the writing and editing appear sloppy, as the formatting and writing style are deeply inconsistent.

And the icing on the weird-editing-choices cake is the ChatGPT response someone forgot to delete:

"If you want, I can also explain columns, primary keys, or other DBMS terms."

"Here is a clear and simple explanation of a Column in DBMS:"

You can see the photo of the textbook page here:

u/imfrom_mars_/Reddit

Redditors on the "India Tech" subReddit were frustrated that people would spend hard-earned money on this product.

"What's the point of buying these textbooks then?!"

"And if it's from a private publisher, it'll be costly, as well!" - Purple-Maybe-7637

"This is so sh*tty. We have to spend so much on these books, and then it's going to be filled with so many errors. The whole education system is dying." - Solid-Measurement-96

"No AI! At least not in textbooks!" - No-Formal2300

"Education is doomed if the younger generation has to study AI slop. No critical thinking, no realisation of facts, grim times ahead for sure!" - No_Chocolate_3292

"BOMBASTIC SIDE-EYE. It seems even the SCHOOL TEXTBOOKS are dependent on ChatGPT now?! We're doomed." - Large_a**2780

"Oh my GOD, is this real? They do proofread before publishing the book, right? How did this get missed? Is the editor named Claude?" - Fast-Enthusiasm-3137

"I can see it now: Author's bibliography: chat.openai.com." - Zealousidea_Owl1129

"Teachers are trying to call students so lazy for using these tools, and yet the PUBLISHERS are so lazy, they don't even..." - Adventurous-Peace15

"This is so disappointing. Maybe talk to your school about not using AI in books. They need to think about what they've done." - Objective_Squirrel87

"Yay! What a fun time to be alive! Fake textbooks! Fake education! Yay!" - Relevant-Criticism-8

There are inevitably going to be professionals in every industry who turn to ChatGPT and other similar platforms to minimize their workload, but there's something particularly nefarious about expecting students to pay for expensive textbooks when they could have just loaded their questions into ChatGPT instead.