US College Assignment Season... Surge in Access?
Serious Phenomenon of College Students' 'ChatGPT Dependence'
On the 12th (Korean time) at 9 a.m., the server of the artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot 'ChatGPT' operated by OpenAI suddenly experienced connection issues. Some speculate that the cause of this outage may be related to 'year-end assignments of American high school and college students,' drawing significant attention.
ChatGPT began experiencing connection problems from 9 a.m. that day. This issue was confirmed not only in the United States, where the headquarters is located, but also in most regions worldwide. Subsequently, OpenAI posted a brief notice stating, "We have identified the problem and are currently working on recovery," and as of 1 p.m., about four hours later, the Korean server appeared to be partially restored.
A graphic showing the uptime status of services provided by OpenAI. ChatGPT, located on the second row from the top, suddenly dropped in uptime and turned red on the morning of the 12th (Korean time). OpenAI homepage
This is not the first time ChatGPT has encountered connection problems. Last month, it caused a large-scale server outage, and in August of last year, the webpage itself became inaccessible, causing confusion. However, each time a connection issue occurred, OpenAI's prompt response led to recovery within 1 to 2 hours.
The cause of the server instability is presumed to be excessive traffic. According to information released by OpenAI, the weekly number of ChatGPT users has already surpassed 300 million, and as of last year, it is estimated that over 2.2 million users in Korea alone are using the service.
ChatGPT operates by receiving queries (information search requests) directly from paid accounts or by providing an application programming interface (API) to third parties. When requests concentrate during specific time periods, there is a risk of processing overload.
Because of this, some local netizens have pointed to 'American high school and college students' as the cause of this connection outage, attracting attention. According to the U.S. educational curriculum, both college and high school students are submitting essay-type year-end assignments around this time. It is speculated that tens of millions of students rushed to ChatGPT to complete their assignments, causing the server to crash.
In American high schools and universities, where essay assignments are frequent, reliance on ChatGPT for homework has been found to be increasing. Pixabay
In fact, on social networking services (SNS) such as X and Reddit, numerous messages presumed to be from students were spotted, saying things like "ChatGPT is down, so I can't do my homework," and "I just realized how much I've depended on ChatGPT."
ChatGPT has penetrated various industries, from office work to professional services and coding tasks, but the most fundamental change it has brought about is in 'education.'
Earlier this year, the U.S. higher education media outlet 'Intelligent' pointed out, "ChatGPT, released in 2022, has had the greatest impact on college education," adding, "A survey conducted by the outlet in February this year among students from 588 universities across the United States found that 69% of respondents already rely on ChatGPT for regular essay assignments." Moreover, 29% of respondents?nearly 3 out of 10?reported entrusting entire essays to ChatGPT.
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