It can explain things, but it gets a ton of things wrong, very wrong.

Using this is college would be a recipe for disaster, you'd ask chatgpt to explain a thing to you and you, being a student, don't know if it's getting the explanation correct or wrong. You don't know if it's reasoning is correct.

ChatGPT isn't telling you the truth or how the world is, it's just spitting out the statistically more likely next word.

It's far enough on this side of the uncanny valley so you think it's a conscious human unless you know enough about the subject to realize that it's not.