AP English Language and AP Seminar teacher Jeanie Griffin thought back to her lessons on how writing shapes an individual’s mind as she nervously plugged in an essay prompt into ChatGPT. Launched in late November last year, ChatGPT is a language model by OpenAI that has the ability to write and translate languages, but one of its main components is generating responses to prompts.
“Artificial intelligence is something that has been developed and has been used by industries for years, but now regular people like students have access to writing letters and essays with it,” Griffin said. “The extent to which students are going to or are willing to use it to write assignments is really yet to be determined, and I’m sure some students will.”
AP Literature and AP Research teacher Lynn Bramlett said her initial reaction to the new program was “complete panic.”
“I thought I’m going to have to restructure everything, and ‘How am I going to be able to teach the way I’ve been teaching in the past?’” Bramlett said. “I’m going to have to not assign out-of-class essays. I’m going to have to give essays — I do a good bit of that anyway with timed writing for in class — with no phones and no computers.”
Griffin said she thinks artificial intelligence is going to have an impact on students everywhere. According to The Guardian, ChatGPT has over 100 million monthly active users, breaking TikTok’s growth to the same user base in time. It has been banned in New York City school networks and devices, and Seattle and Los Angeles school districts restricted it.
“The extent of it is probably greater than what most of us really realize,” she said. “There are going to be some students who understand the real need to write. You need to understand the world around you and to formulate your own thoughts, ideas and make connections. If you want to be someone who is educated and is able to have a higher level of critical thinking, you really have to be able to write.”
Freshman Christopher Estevez said when he first heard of ChatGPT he was surprised that a computer could write so well and give accurate information.
“It’s really good for studying and helping to answer questions,” he said. “It gives details as to why something is what it is rather than just knowing the answer but not knowing why it’s the right answer. I think it’s good for history because I might have questions about certain topics. If I have a question in chemistry, it’ll explain how to do something.”
Brimma Tech employee Subramanian Periasamy, junior Shaila Venkat’s uncle, works with artificial intelligence often. He said although ChatGPT can give accurate information, there are concerns about misinformation. The information ChatGPT uses helps it understand language, which allows it to create a prompt in response to different inputs.
“If you train the language model with bad data, then you are going to get a bad outcome,” Periasamy said. “You can type any question into ChatGPT, and it’s able to answer because so much information is fed. There’s so much information publicly available, so they feed all the information into the system, and it will take it as a token.”
Griffin tested an AI checker on student-written and computer-generated work.
“I did get an account and I used it to check a few papers to see what it would do,” Griffin said. “The AI checker found out that AI wrote the blip I made in the program. Another work I used was student work, but I wanted to see if AI would flag it, which it did not.”
Bramlett also tested ChatGPT briefly for her capstone and literature classes.
“I definitely have noticed some [differences between AI and student work],” Bramlett said. “We have the COVID-19 setbacks, so some of the writing skills are a little lacking now more so than they have in the past. [AI is] much more formal than what a lot of our students are capable of doing at this point.”
Turnitin, an academic integrity service used internationally for educational purposes, announced in December that it would include its most advanced AI detection abilities into its market products for educators in 2023. Although Turnitin had “AI functionality built into [their solutions] dating back to 2015,” the new technology will allow ChatGPT to be better detected.
“AP College Board uses Turnitin for plagiarism checking,” Griffin said. “The real question then comes to if AP is going to be checking to see if students are actually writing their own papers, especially for seminar and research papers. Is it going to be available in May or over the summer when they check the papers?”
Turnitin is not the only platform increasing ChatGPT detection capabilities. Princeton senior Edward Tian created GPTZero to identify artificial intelligence, and he released it to the public Jan. 2. GPTZero has indicators of perplexity and burstiness. Periasamy said AI detectors are necessary to keep technology in check.
“You don’t want technology to be misused,” Periasamy said. “There should be some security aspects. Every time information is collected, that and security go hand in hand. If you build an AI, you as a provider should make sure it’s not used for wrong purposes.”
AI is another technological development teachers have to deal with in addition to more accessible plagiarism.
“There are always going to be people who look for shortcuts, but just because you can find a shortcut to something doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to be the best thing to do for you as an individual,” Griffin said. “Sometimes people make good choices and they’re willing to do the hard work, but some students are not willing to do that.”
According to Griffin, although AI could be beneficial for revision, it ultimately takes power away from students.
“Just to try to use a program like this to write for you is not good for students because then a computer becomes their mind,” Griffin said. “When students lose their mind, they lose the ability to think. They lose their ability to be an individual or a human being, and they just become part of a robotic system.”
Bramlett said although AI is “going to be a crutch for people,” it opens up other discussions.
“Writing skills aren’t going to be stressed as much in certain ways,” she said. “Not everybody wants to be a writer. When you look at it that way, it’s sort of why should everybody have to be proficient in writing? But I also think writing is communication, you have to be able to articulate yourself.”
For Bramlett, AI is not a replacement for English instruction in schools.
“I know what I hope, but I also know the reality is teachers are going to have to become more creative and they’re going to have to adapt to those new ideas and programs,” she said. “People forget that when they think of educators, we do more than just instill knowledge, and AI is not going to be able to do those other things that we were able to do.”
Estevez said that artificial intelligence is changing how schools and industries can work now.
“I think it will start affecting jobs because if you can have a computer, why can’t you have a robot do something for you instead?” he said. “There are not going to be many people doing their own work unless something else changes. Writing assignments in class would not be done at home because teachers wouldn’t be able to trust students.”