Home / Technology

Student Uses AI and a 3D Printer To Do Their Homework Assignment for Them

By Sara Barnes on February 7, 2023

Photo: Screenshot from TikTok

Artificial intelligence has been everywhere lately. Though it's presenting interesting prospects in the tech world, it's also proving to potentially make things very challenging for educators. For work that’s turned in online, there’s always the potential that an AI chatbot could do an assignment for the student. Having the pupil turn in a handwritten copy is one way to guard against that, but a TikTok user found a way around it. They used ChatGPT to complete the given assignment and then programmed a 3D printer to record the answers that the AI wrote.

TikTok user 3d_printer_stuff shared a series of videos detailing how it all came together, including one tutorial that shows the same steps you’d need to take if you wanted technology to do your homework, too.

The student began by opening up ChatGPT and entering the task in the program. They then instructed the AI to write the assignment. Once it was done, they went to another site called 3DWriter and copied the text there. After finding the right font and spacing for the sheet, they then positioned lined paper on the 3D printer so that it would record the text onto the lines—just like a human would. The final step? “Enjoy the time saved,” 3d_printer_stuff said.

Though this may be seen as a clever shortcut, it’s important to recognize how harmful it is to one’s education. If the point of homework is for extra practice outside of the classroom, then using these round-about methods of automating assignments is only hurting your future self and the grasp of class concepts. Some school districts have already recognized the possibilities for cheating and have banned ChatGPT as a result. The New York City Department of Education has restricted access to it on school-owned networks and devices, stating concerns for the “potential to undermine student learning.”