Edtech Chegg Tumbles as ChatGPT Threat Prompts Revenue Warning

What's the cost of students using ChatGPT for homework? For U.S. education services provider Chegg, it could be nearly $1 billion in market valuation. From a report: Chegg signaled the rising popularity of viral chatbot ChatGPT was pressuring its subscriber growth and prompted it to suspend its full-year outlook, sending shares of the company 47% lower in early trading on Tuesday. "Since March, we saw a significant spike in student interest in ChatGPT. We now believe it's having an impact on our new customer growth rate," said Chegg CEO Dan Rosensweig. There are fears Chegg's core business could become extinct as consumers experiment with free artificial intelligence (AI) tools, said analyst Brent Thill at Jefferies, which downgraded the stock to "hold." Last month, the Santa Clara, California-based firm said it would launch ChatGPT's AI powered CheggMate, a study aide tailored to students' needs, at a time educators were grappling with the consequences of the homework drafting chatbot.

Chegg is a scam

[Puls4r]

Chegg is failing because Chegg has always BEEN a scam. They don't vet their answers, most of which are wrong of imcomplete. They charge money and promise the world and don't give refunds. If you look at reviews they've had horrible ones for a long time.

But hey, let's keep up with the 'chatGPT is ending the world!' hysteria. Cause it gets clicks. AmIRite?

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[gweihir]

So actually something where ChatGPT does better? Chegg must be truly awful. That they have a business at all nicely shows that something as mediocre as ChatGPT can still be an improvement.

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[HiThere]

Seriously, ChatGPT does some things quite well, and others reasonably well. Of course, there are the others, but many teachers have reported that it does topical essays about as well as their students.

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[gweihir]

Seriously, ChatGPT does some things quite well, and others reasonably well. Of course, there are the others, but many teachers have reported that it does topical essays about as well as their students.

Wich just shows that most students do topical essays really badly.

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[VeryFluffyBunny]

Truly awful? When's the last time you read any undergraduate's essays? Even the ones that have been awarded high grades. Both Chegg & ChatGPT are an improvement on the vast majority of typical undergrad writing.

3rd party services like Chegg are only popular because HE institutions don't typically provide effective writing instruction. Students are typically left to struggle with it on their own & offered optional writing instruction with varying degrees of efficacy from library services, learning

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[gweihir]

Actually I have never read an undergraduate's essay. I teach (part time) CS and IT and essay writing is not a thing there. I may get some idea from grading exams when I ask for explanations though. Often pretty bad.

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[Roger W Moore]

3rd party services like Chegg are only popular because HE institutions don't typically provide effective writing instruction.

Yes, it's almost like we expect you to learn how to write at school.

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[VeryFluffyBunny]

Yes, it's almost like we expect you to learn how to write at school.

School pupils typically get taught how to write narrative, expository, & discursive texts in popular lay-person genres & registers. They don't teach HE writing, which is significantly different. There's a tonne of Applied Linguistics research on how undergrads, who've done very well in secondary school, struggle to learn to write in HE genres & registers, & how they typically don't get sufficient support. What tutors in HE call writing instruction usually turns out to be students & tutor

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[steveg]

I have no love for Chegg, but I'm sorry to see ChatGPT take their business.

ChatGPT provides sort of plausible answers, even if they're kind of generic. Until it starts pulling something out of its ass, or starts citing sources that I don't expect the student to have actually read -- at that point I look at their work more closely and can tell that it wasn't really them.

Chegg's answers are always obvious bullshit from the get-go. Easy to catch.

Buggy whip company?

[Gibgezr]

Sounds like a company that was good at making buggy whips.

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[sound+vision]

"Chegger" sounds more like a small, parasitic insect to me.

Perhaps the hosts have had enough.

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[VeryFluffyBunny]

Oh, you'll love "Cheggers Plays Pop" then: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

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[sound+vision]

So this Chegger was not only a parasite... but a host. Interesting

some fun goes away

[ghostlibrary]

A professor told me he would post technically correct but overly compex solutions to his own homework problems on Chegg. If a Physics 100 student solved an F=ma problem using his Lagrange equivalent answer, he knew they'd cut-and-pasted. Hard to do in ML, which is more likely to hallucinate a wrong answer than to provide a ridiculous yet correct one.

Re: some fun goes away

[Fons_de_spons]

Highschool teacher here... As long as kids do not figure out to instruct gpt to add a few spelling errors, the generated solutions are easy to spot. I wish I was kidding.

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[EvilSS]

Prompt: I need a one paragraph summary of the Civil war. Include some common spelling errors.

ChatGPT response: The Cival War (1861-1865) waz a devestating confict in the Untied States betwen the Union (North) and the Confederacy (South), primarily over the isue of slavery and state's writes. The war begon with the attak on Fort Sumter, and major battles like Gettysbrug and Anteitam were importnt turning points. The Union, led by President Abrham Lincoln, was ultimetely vistorious, and slavery was abolishe

The Civil War

[Roger W Moore]

That would still be easy to catch as a cheat because where I'm from the civil war was 1642-1652 between the Royalists and the Parliamentarians.

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[gweihir]

Indeed. From my time as a TA I routinely saw things like an exponent becoming a factor when people copied solutions and then becoming an index. When students complained to me about how I did know they had not come up with the answers themselves, I showed one example of that. Never got any more complains with that class. Of course that was with hand-written answers, but the general principle remains.

_Smart_ copying of results is hard to spot. But it involves the one doing it understanding and verifying the a

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[VeryFluffyBunny]

Actually, the quality of the texts produced by ChatGPT is usually higher than most high-school students are capable of, in terms of lexical richness & appropriateness, complexity of phrasal, clausal, & sentence structures, paragraph structuring, staging, etc.. Whatever you do, don't tell students that ChatGPT can generate texts at specific grade levels; then it really will be hard to distinguish between them.

Pressuring its subscriber growth?

[Mononymous]

So the English translation is new subscriptions to their homework help service are growing slower than expected, and they blame students asking ChatGPT for free instead of paying them for (hopefully more reliable) help.

Dummies using Chegg or gpt, doesn't matter

[iAmWaySmarterThanYou]

So dummies who partied instead of studying have another option to avoid failing their classes and still,learn nothing either way.

Get bad unvetted answers from Chegg or get chatgpt hallucinations. Either way the student still learns nothing and turns in stupid shit they don't understand and didn't try to vet for themselves.

I don't feel bad for cheater service Chegg or for dummies in school cheating with gpt or anything else.

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[omnichad]

The difference is that for a while, you can fail upward through your career by continuing to use ChatGPT.

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[iAmWaySmarterThanYou]

Until it hallucinates you into getting fired or you get questioned by your boss on your project or have to make a presentation and answer questions you can't answer because you copy pasted the robot.

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[omnichad]

It won't last forever, but there is a lot of dumb management out there that don't even understand the ground-level work.

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[bussdriver]

a lot of management (middle) has been almost robotic for DECADES seems like they will be gone 1st... and working for them will likely suck more... I can see a game of worker bots vs management bots until upper management realizes they can both be replaced.

EdTech needs better tech

[awwshit]

If you can't beat them, join them.

Is a service with unverified answers really a service at all?

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[gweihir]

Well, ChatGPT also provides unverified answers and look what some people try to build on that. They just seem to be a bit better than this EdTech scam.

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[awwshit]

Unchecked answers all the way down, no one wins, all of these services are garbage unless you already know what you are doing. If you do know what you are doing, then these services are only helpful at mundane tasks.

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[gweihir]

I completely agree. Tools like this can make suggestions with some mediocre level of accuracy, but they cannot provide solutions and you do really need top know what you are doing to filter out the nonsense. Basically just a somewhat better search engine than the crap being offered by Google and others today, but with the occasional "hallucination" (i.e. lie) thrown in.

Hence very limited suitability as learning support and only for people that are quite smart and can reliably fact check. That is a small min