ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence language model that has quickly risen in prominence since a California firm released it four months ago, is on the minds of educators and students alike.
Some students at Burlington High School described it as a better form of Google’s search engine because it responds to questions that users submit and gives detailed responses, the way a person would respond.
But many educators are worried about its use in schools, since the program developed by San Francisco-based OpenAI is capable of writing essays and completing assignments, and has already passed a variety of exams.
Bowen Stephens, a ninth-grade civics teacher at the school, recently caught a student who used ChatGPT to write a one-page essay for U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders’ State of the Union Student essay contest.
“The one that I was able to identify was really obvious because it was so grammatically perfect and so completely soulless,” Stephens said.
Stephens — who subsequently caught two other students using ChatGPT to complete or enhance their work — told the student she would much rather students learn to write well and edit their own work than turn in perfect essays.
“That’s how all human beings write and get better, (instead of) cracking down really hard on someone,” Stephens said.
Awareness of ChatGPT — and its competitors, such as Google’s Bard API — is common among students at Burlington High School. Of six students who spoke to VTDigger, five knew about and had used the program before.
First-year student, Sam Doherty, noted that the school doesn’t block access to ChatGPT, which means students can tap into it on school Chromebooks.
Four of the students VTDigger spoke with had used ChatGPT on assignments for research purposes and to help with editing papers. None had used it to complete their assignments, they said.
First-year student Keats Overman, described using ChatGPT for something other than schoolwork.
“I had an apology that I wanted to say to another student, and I used ChatGPT to give me advice on how to write the apology,” Overman said.
He also used it to check for grammar mistakes in a paper he’d written. Overman said he informed his teacher that he had used the program to check for grammar, and said his teacher was fine with that as long as he had done the writing.
Fourth-year student Sylvan Franklin said he uses ChatGPT “for mostly math, solving like word problems with explanations, because other algebra calculators can’t do that yet.”
Franklin has also used it for personal learning initiatives, and as a resource tool. So had other students.
Franklin recalled students talking about using ChatGPT to answer questions for a reading packet in his AP U.S. History class. “I did hear people talking about just using ChatGPT to like autofill that entire thing in seconds,” he said.
Stephens said Burlington High classifies use of ChatGPT as plagiarism, but she doubts banning it is a viable solution. Educators should view the software “as a tool,” she said.
“I do think there is some middle ground there, and making sure that students have the opportunities to learn how to express themselves through writing,” she said. “But I think that there is definitely a space for using AI as a way to help them to do that better and more effectively.”
Sniffing out AI
Connor Byam, a second-year student and reporter for Burlington High’s school newspaper, The Register, wrote an article about students at Burlington High who had admitted, off the record, to using the software for assignments.
“I think people are totally underestimating … and not reacting strongly enough to its release and what it means for work and education,” Byam said in an interview.
Byam thinks artificial intelligence programs should not be allowed for use in academic work because of questions around their reliability, as well as the ease with which students can use them to cheat on assignments.
Most students who spoke to VTDigger said they had not heard their teachers discuss ChatGPT in the classroom, unless they brought it up themselves.
There are programs designed to catch if something has been written by AI language models such as ChatGPT, but they are not foolproof. GPTZero, created by Edward Tian, a computer science and journalism student at Princeton University, was released in early January and is one of the first programs to detect AI writing. OpenAI created its own detection program, and is working on a tool akin to watermarking to distinguish any text that ChatGPT generates.
There are endless possibilities for using AI — including journalism.
The Atlantic used ChatGPT as an API — short for application programming interface, which allows software programs to communicate with one another — to integrate into an online article. Every time a reader refreshes the page, ChatGPT produces a new response, making the story ever-changing.
According to The New York Times, robot reporters have produced news stories on company earnings for Bloomberg, minor league baseball for The Associated Press, high school football for The Washington Post and earthquakes for the Los Angeles Times. However, publishers say robot reporters will not replace journalists, though they will free them up for deeper reporting.
A new landscape for plagiarism
In the realm of education, concerns about ChatGPT and its competitors center on whether students are doing creative work themselves, or tapping into artificial intelligence.
The current definitions of plagiarism may also have to change as AI develops. At the University of Vermont, the code for academic integrity has undergone a subtle shift.
Susanmarie Harrington, director of UVM’s Writing in the Disciplines program, said the code used to state that “work a student handed in couldn’t have been completed by another person.”
Now, the code states, “Students may not claim as their own work any portion of academic work that was not completed by the student,” language designed to inhibit the use of artificial intelligence in writing assignments.
Some schools have banned ChatGPT while others embrace it. The New York City Department of Education banned ChatGPT in public schools in early January, while the University of Pittsburgh has set up resources for faculty members to learn about ChatGPT and ways they can use it in the classroom.
Correction: Due to an editing error, an earlier version of this story mischaracterized the relationship between ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Bing.