The impact of ChatGPT in schools

A dive into how ChatGPT and Artificial Intelligence will impact the classroom environment and expectations

Anya Biswas, Staff Writer & Nethra Pai, Staff Writer

ChatGPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) is an artificial intelligence launched on Nov. 30, 2022  that responds to various prompts with text mimicking human language. Since then, ChatGPT has proven to be extremely successful; its abilities range from creating recipes to writing code, and most notably, this AI has many uses in education, both positive and negative.

One of the biggest concerns that administration and teachers face is students using ChatGPT to do their assignments rather than doing them themselves. The Fulton County Schools Handbook states that copying from another source and submitting it as one’s work is an honor code violation. Therefore, teachers will punish students who write essays or assignments using ChatGPT under the same guidelines. 

“Whether you copy your friend's paper, get it off the internet, or you get AI to do it, that's an honor code violation and an integrity issue,” Martin Neuhaus, the principal at Northview High School, said. 

Additionally, many argue that using ChatGPT to cheat is unfair to students making genuine efforts to learn. Compared to the average student who takes time to create well-written essays, those who cheat using chatbots only have to write one phrase and ChatGPT will create an essay instantaneously. 

“I try, I put an effort, and I pride myself on my academic ability and intellect,” sophomore Serena Wong said.  “To watch people rely on the work and programs of others to achieve the same work is honestly a little pathetic. Ultimately, relying on programs to generate answers will hurt you when you don't have those [programs] to turn to.”

Wong, much like Neuhaus, thinks that using programs like ChatGPT will also harm students in the long run. In order to combat this development, web tools like GPTZero can detect whether ChatGPT wrote something. Because of this, students who have started to rely on this tool may find themselves lost on future essays and assessments like the AP exam. 

“If you want to play a musical instrument you have to do the work,” Neuhaus said. “You have got to practice, get some notes, and you have got to get the feedback. You probably can go and find somebody else playing whatever instrument and submit that, but it won’t be as helpful.”

The general consensus is that while ChatGPT can write consistently average essays, it cannot simulate a human completely. Tania Pope, an English teacher at Northview, received an essay written by ChatGPT to grade. While she considered it a decent essay, Pope noted that it lacked sophistication and voice, qualities that an AI cannot emulate. 

“I specifically sent it back and I said, ‘Well, I feel like it’s missing the voice,’” Tania Pope, an AP Lang teacher at Northview said. “The essence of argument is your ability to bring voice and your ideas and your interpretation, and your interaction with the world and all of that is taken away from you with ChatGPT.” 

Furthermore, critics of ChatGPT assert that AI lacks creativity. Because it merges different texts from the internet, writing produced via ChatGPT often sounds bleak. 

“It does limit your own personal opinion in the article when it just gives you the answer itself,” junior Kate Li said.

This lack of opinion in AI-generated writing is something Pope believes will affect the creative writing process as a whole, especially if the use of ChatGPT and similar tools become more widespread.

“We’ve gotta think through these things,” Pope said. “Think about how we use language; think how we construct that language. It’s such a critical thinking process; it’s such a creative process, and we lose all of that to ChatGPT.”

Schools have seen a return to writing paper essays rather than typed ones since ChatGPT makes digital essays far more of a liability. This is a shift from recent years when many assignments moved online because of virtual school.

“We moved to this whole thing of doing assignments on computers, and so it's probably gonna be back to handwritten things so that we can get away from AI,” Pope said. “I feel like we’re constantly having to evolve education to meet the changing world of technology out there.”

While virtual school made it difficult for teachers to punish cheating, now, they have different options, like making assessments handwritten.

“With the way ChatGPT is being used right now, we could see the end of essays written at home because of how easy it is to fabricate,” junior Rohit Rao said. “In this context, it could adversely affect the assignments students get, but I think ChatGPT is a good resource for education.”

If used correctly, ChatGPT could become an excellent tool to assist the learning process. Technologies like ChatGPT can revolutionize the future of education with abilities to create lesson plans, summarize difficult topics, and even create personalized tutoring schedules.

“Well, I think of it like Grammarly, because it just fixes your grammar, but it also helps teach you about things, ” Li said.

Li compares ChatGPT to EasyBib and Grammarly, tools that some of her teachers suggest using in the classroom. In fact, there is talk to use it for lesson plans in the future.

“Some teachers will start to get dynamic with it,” Pope said. “When you start to think about classes like AP Seminar and AP Research, which rely so much on lots of research that you are doing, you cannot handwrite that much research. That is just not the world we are living in.”

ChatGPT can either become an asset or a hindrance to the classroom, ultimately it depends on how teachers and students decide to use it.