By Kai Rebelo
AI such as Chat-GPT, Chat Sonic, Bing AI, and all of the other new GPT-4 has seen an exponential increase in use in the past few years. Students and teachers have been said to be using it for fun and experimental uses, but some teachers on campus have started running into problems with AI as students are using it to plagiarize essays and classwork. Is AI helping students answer quick questions academically/personally or are kids taking advantage of this quick solution to their procrastination?
The Dig interviewed two of our English teachers on campus, Mr. Carr and Mr. Young and asked a few questions about their opinion on AI use in school situations and a few about personal use of this technology as well. When asked if they thought if this new AI technology was helping or hurting student’s education, Mr. Carr replied with,
“Students have many resources to use for help with school work and AI is now one of them. Help is the key word. The danger with these AI systems is that students may just have the AI do the work for them or they may just copy what the AI spits out. This is not the purpose of education or learning.”
Mr. Young responded to the same question with,
“I don’t have an answer to this yet, because I haven’t really encountered any students actively using it other than to just flat-out cheat. I definitely believe there is a valuable tool somewhere in there. I’m all for finding ways to use the tech to help us in the class—I could totally see ChatGPT being an ENORMOUS tool and resource in essay writing…and I mean original writing, but with the help of AI. I believe that’s possible…but it also takes a certain level of honesty that I don’t really think exists in our culture.”
Both teachers acknowledged the fact that this AI can be extremely useful with situations such as minor mistake corrections and small questions to help the student better their existing work but there is tons of room for students to take advantage of this resource and use it for plagiarism in their school work. We asked the two if they had ever actually seen or caught students using this AI technology in their work so far and Carr stated that,
“As of right now, I haven’t noticed many students using it. It is still pretty new so that may change in the coming years.”
However Young mentioned to us that,
“It really hasn’t caught on quite as much as you would think. I would say 50% of my students aren’t even really familiar with it. Or, maybe they’re just better at being dishonest. ….This year, I’ve had 3three instances where I suspected AI being used. One of the students came and talked to me and convinced me otherwise—after our conversation and going back to the work, I was positive they were telling me the truth and their work was authentic. Another student admitted to using AI, but ‘only for the conclusion,’ which didn’t really add up. And the third student just flat out denied using any AI at all, even though they couldn’t explain the sources they used.”
This shows that this brand-new technology may not have reached everyone, yet those that it has reached have chosen to take advantage of it, for better or worse. This AI technology reduces the creativity in students extremely and lowers their work quality, increasing the amount of work that AI has put into it. Most of our teachers on campus agree that AI-like chat GPT should be banned from school settings and from our students’ computers and some like Mr. Carr believe that this technology is just “too new to judge” if it should be completely blocked from everyone’s computers.
We all have different experiences and opinions on the Chat GPT technology, we would love to hear your opinions on the subject as well. AI has evolved exponentially during the past couple of years and we think it is only going to get more and more evolved and advanced and maybe we won’t be able to stop kids from using it…