Artificial intelligence (AI) has been a hot topic of conversation recently, especially in education. It is starting to raise questions about what the future of education may look like. A growing concern across the nation is that with these tools, students cheat by relegating their work to the AI, who can write a long, detailed assignment in a matter of seconds, bypassing the learning process that is usually required to complete the work.
For example, ChatGPT, a software developed by OpenAI, is capable of writing complex essays, poems, stories, and more at a user’s request. OpenAI is a company dedicated to ensuring that artificial general intelligence becomes beneficial for humanity. However, the software has become controversial since it has been considered to have a negative impact on the classroom.
“ChatGPT risks damaging students’ writing ability, as well as their general work ethic,” English teacher Mx Barr said. “Even if they block the website on school servers, students have personal devices they can use. There’s a limit to what a school district can do to restrict that activity.”
ChatGPT can produce a basic summary, but it can’t reproduce human originality, Barr said. A machine can produce randomness, but that’s not the same thing as the originality or creativity that a person could write, xe said. Technology is getting to the point where AI can edit more effectively than a lot of the things we’ve seen so far, Barr added.
“I’m sending kids out to the world, hopefully knowing how to communicate and document their ideas,” Barr said. “ And if they’ve cheated their way through that using AI, there are going to be other barriers that come into their way even if I’ve failed to catch it.”
However, there are a few ways teachers can recognize the work of an AI, such as pinpointing a student’s vocabulary. For example, teachers are able to learn a student’s vocabulary, writing styles, and other patterns, and then, when an assignment does not match, it is an indicator the work was written by AI, English teacher David Soltero said.
“As teachers, we know our students, and we know, based off how much time we spent with them, their own capabilities, their own writing style, their own comprehension,” Soltero explained. “And so if it’s like something out of the ordinary, right, then it’s kind of an indicator that it might not be their work.
Around the country, ChatGPT and other similar software are being blocked at schools, according to Business Insider. At the same time, new software is being developed to detect computer-written text, including an update to Turnitin.com that would successfully detect ChatGPT written text, according to Business Insider.
“At the moment, I think it’s on the fence because it’s new, and we don’t know a whole lot about it and how to actually incorporate it into the classrooms and the limitations to it and also identifying if a student’s response is AI-generated,” Soltero said. “I think right now, the limitation is okay, having (ChatGPT) blocked in school computers, but I think once we start to know more about it, and how it can be a tool in the classroom, then we start to refocus and reevaluate the limits that we place on it,” he added.
There’s not much that teachers can do except stay vigilant and catch as many students as they can when they do cheat and educate them about why that’s wrong, English teacher Ana Hahs said. She has caught approximately 50% of her students using ChatGPT to turn in their assignments, whether the assignments were “big or small”, she said. There is a growing need for teachers to assign handwritten work in their classes in order to limit the amount of cheating taking place in all assignments.
“In order for it to be positive, it has to be students still creating their own original responses, but also a responsibility on the students to recognize that it’s a tool that’s supplemental,” Soltero said. “I do think that maybe in the future, it could be something that we use similar to how we use other resources online that help us with our understanding or comprehension of texts or even learning more about how to grow as a writer.”