AI, ChatGPT, and Education

By now most of you have probably heard about the new Artificial Intelligence (AI) content generator, ChatGPT. It came online November 30 and had over 1 million users five days later, faster than any other application in history. By mid-January it had logged over 500 million unique uses and OpenAI, the company that started ChatGPT, expects over 1 billion users by the end of this year. It presents an enormous leap forward in AI technology, and there will be untold numbers of ways to use this technology. One of the biggest concerns that schools across the country have voiced is the unauthorized use of ChatGPT to create content for assignments, i.e. plagiarism. Our handbook defines plagiarism as "the representation of work (words, phrases, graphics, ideas, or images) of another's not commonly known as one's own, that is, without quotation marks, footnotes, or some form of citation."

 

I wanted to call attention to a new line in our handbooks that we have added to address this particular concern: "Students are not permitted to submit work generated by an AI system for any assignment unless specifically authorized by their teacher. Violations of this will be treated as plagiarism offenses and handled similarly."

 

On a less tactical and more philosophical level, using AI programs like this (and there will be several more in the very near future) to replace the writing process represents a complete philosophical disconnect with our mission to educate students. The very core of our success is built on the struggle that each student must undergo to refine their thought processes and communicate their ideas. By ceding this process to an AI system, those pathways of development will not be built. Additionally, critical thinking continues to be one of the pillars of our pedagogy, and communicating original, critical thoughts in our writing will always have its place in our teaching.

 

Our faculty and admin teams have been having and will continue to have deep conversations around this idea. AI is a powerful technology that will likely push us all to evaluate our practice, just as other technologies have done. On some levels, it is not a whole lot different than any new technology disrupting the old system. One can find stories about the "crisis in education" when writing overtook the oral tradition a few thousand years ago — Socrates spoke about how writing things down would "provide students with the appearance of wisdom, not with its reality" — or the shift that happened in education when the internet made all information instantly available to everyone. We will find appropriate ways to use this technology to help us educate students, and in the meantime we will help them navigate this new reality with honor and areté.