Recent developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI) such as ChatGPT have sparked concerns over the future of the education system. For some people, these developments just create an easy opportunity to cheat, but for others, they represent an integral technological advancement in our society.
ChatGPT is a program that is causing controversy over the issue of cheating in the classroom. Designed by OpenAI, the software can respond to anything the user asks quickly and effectively. The program is able to process and create answers that can have the authenticity of a human by pulling information from all over the internet. This creates problems in the classroom environment as students are able to give ChatGPT an essay prompt and the program is able to reply with a full essay on the prompt in seconds, allowing students to easily copy and paste.
While this software is the perfect breeding ground for cheating in schools, ChatGPT represents much bigger real-world developments, AP Computer Science teacher Charles Castleman said.
“I think the advancement of technology and AI is reality,” Castleman said. “It’s not like we can decide that we don’t want to advance in things that could potentially help us solve our problems as a society and solve engineering problems just because it creates issues in schools.”
However, the way ChatGPT obtains information causes problems as to whether or not all the information ChatGPT replies with is true, according to “AI experts on whether you should be ‘terrified’ of ChatGPT”.
“It (ChatGPT) wasn’t taught to understand what is fact, what is fiction, or anything like that,” AI researcher Timnit Gebru said. “It’ll just sort of parrot back what was on the internet.”
This program is not perfect, Castleman said. For example, when asked whether the root of four is rational or irrational, the program replied by giving proof as to why the root of four is irrational, he said. However, after giving the program the same prompt a week later, ChatGPT was able to correctly say that the number is rational, he explained.
Rather than spelling disaster for the education system, AI could assist it in some cases, junior and five-year coder Arnav Khinvasara said.
“I think as we progress more towards AI, the classroom environment will be different,” Khinvasara said. “We will have different things teaching us, maybe not just teachers or platforms that we have right now.”
The incentive to cheat is nothing new as there have always been resources available to students that would encourage cheating, Castleman said.
“There are other ways (to cheat) even before there was ChatGPT,” Castleman said. “Quizlet, things like that with students being able to look up answers.”
In addition, blocking ChatGPT in the school environment and creating the necessary programs to detect whether or not ChatGPT was used would curb the amount of cheating, Khinvasara said.
“As we are using AI more, and as we progress, we will learn more about how to stop AI in some situations where we don’t want AI to be useful … in cheating, for example,” Khinvasara said.
Castleman explained that a way to reduce ChatGPT use is to form a curriculum based more on understanding and developing, he said.
“I think while ChatGPT can give you answers to certain questions, it doesn’t tell you what questions to ask,” Castleman said. “You still have to know the basics. Just because we have calculators doesn’t mean we stop teaching first and second-graders basic math. Because if you don’t know the basics, you won’t be able to learn stuff later,” he said.
While developments in AI will affect the education system, that doesn’t mean that there is anything inherently wrong with ChatGPT, just the way some choose to use it, Castleman said.
“I don’t think there is anything wrong with building tools to help us think,” Castleman said. “The problem is when they begin to think for us.”