*Names changed to protect identity
As assigned essays can result in hours of homework for students, ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence that may change the way students write — by doing it for them.
OpenAI, an artificial intelligence research corporation, released the ChatGPT chatbot on Nov. 30. Since its release, the AI has impacted academic honesty in written assignments. Some students, like sophomore George Reeds*, have already started to utilize OpenAI to finish their work.
“It’s super easy to use,” Reeds said. “You can just copy and paste a question, and it’ll have a quality piece of writing in minutes. Everything it comes up with is an easy A. None of my teachers have noticed anything.”
While it erodes academic honesty, this increased public access to AI is a leap forward in the tech industry, according to Shawnee Mission West IB English teacher Ben Pabst. Due to the easy access to free essay writing, he believes a spike in cheating is imminent.
“If you go through years and years and years of school, and you’re able to use AI to generate thoughts for you, I think that our educational experience could become more shallow,” Pabst said. “To learn how to discuss and interact with others. I just fear that we’re getting away from that.”
The future of academia depends on how educators treat AI — according to Wall Street Journal Head Tech Columnist Joanna Stern.
Pabst believes that AI shouldn’t be involved as it will inhibit interpersonal skills within his classroom. He values face-to-face interaction and he plans to adopt a more traditional learning style. Students will handwrite the majority of their work and stay off their laptops to reduce the use of ChatGPT.
On the other hand, Stern and social studies teacher Robert Bickers believe that schools should embrace software. Bickers suggests using it as a tool to help kids by presenting various writing styles or instructing students to edit the generated responses.
Despite the sides, Pabst, Reeds, Bickers and Stern all agreed that AI is ever-evolving and that banning the chatbot would be a transient solution.
AI-detecting software such as Originality or Plag.ai for teachers to use to combat AI, but it’s extremely difficult to distinguish a response from ChatGPT from one written by a human. ChatGPT uses a highly advanced language model that has been trained on a wide variety of text, allowing it to generate responses that are similar in style and content to those written by humans.
To further prove the chatbot’s abilities, the paragraph above was written using ChatGPT.
Despite the capabilities of AI, it is still in development. The program is unable to provide sources and often switches up characters when quoting certain texts, according to Bickers, and there are basic composition errors that a human would usually catch.
“It can be useful,” Bickers said. “Right now, it’s a parlor trick. ‘Oh, look at this cool thing.’ When you scratch the surface, it looks impressive, but the end results are still not great.”