a tool or an obstacle?

By Anandita Devata, Shuhan Jin, Abha Kulkarni & Annie Xu Staff Writers

“Yes, ChatGPT is amazing and impressive… and what is lurking inside is egregious,” UC Berkeley Assistant Professor Steven Piantadosi said upon reading code from Chat Generatve Pre-trained Transformer (ChatGPT), a chatbot developed by OpenAI which has reached immense Internet fame, garnering more than one million users since its launch on Nov. 30, 2022. ChatGPT transforms user-specifed prompts into well-writen essays, legal briefs, computer code, and more. Like DALL·E, another OpenAI creaton that responds with art given a short descripton, artfcial intelligence (AI) can provide inspiraton and an outline for students to build to use in academic work. However, there’s a line between taking inspiraton and plagiarizing, and students should be encouraged to use such technology for the former, not the later.

AI programs can be misused through cheatng and plagiarism, with research from the Stanford Survey of Adolescent School Experiences in 2009 fnding that 97% of high school students admited to cheating at least once during the year. AI platorms will further increase the concerningly high rates of cheating. Unfortunately, material from sites such as ChatGPT are ofen overlooked by plagiarism detectors, enabling academic dishonesty. While cheatng may yield correct answers in seconds, students do not build skills necessary for future work. “[Using ChatGPT] does not build critcal-thinking and problemsolving skills, which are essental for academic and lifelong success,” New York City Department of Educaton Deputy Press Secretary Jenna Lyle said.

Additonally, ChatGPT poses the double-threat of danger and fake news within its answers. OpenAI itself has admited that the chatbot fails to understand what the words it produces mean within the context of each other, resultng in a large number of false responses. Certain programs also have been known to answer questons regarding illegal practces, such as 3D printng a gun. With school shootngs being more rampant than ever, access to this type of informaton raises concerns of safety of students and staf.

Adding to the poor content moderaton, these AI technologies can also perpetuate prejudice and exacerbate systemic discriminaton. ChatGPT, when prompted, is known to discriminate based on race and gender. For example, when Piantadosi requested the bot to write a functon to check if someone would be a “good scientst” based on their race and gender, it atributed white and male to such quality. Since students are stll maturing and learning about biases, such prejudices can severely decrease their self-esteem. In Paramount Insights’ Refectng Me: Global Representaton on Screen Survey, nearly 60% percent of the more than 15,000 partcipants felt poorly represented in media, and said that it made them feel “unimportant, ignored, or disappointed,” with 41% selectng self-esteem and confdence as the factor most negatvely impacted by the lack of representaton.

Despite these faws, AI has the potental to enhance the educaton system and learning process. These readily accessible technologies can bring resources, such as increased access to technology, to low-income households. A natonal average of 17%, roughly 3.4 million, of students are from low-income households. ChatGPT can easily be accessed with a Wi-Fi connecton, which can ultmately help underprivileged students. Additonally, such technology can help students receive targeted help, since it’s diffcult to receive personalized feedback from teachers in large academic environments. Tools such as Grammarly and Smodin allow students to properly understand a variety of topics, creatng a comfortable learning environment. Many educators also feel similarly about integratng AI into everyday teaching. For example, Alice Keeler, instructor of Math at Fresno Pacifc University, encourages students to download Photomath, a program which generates solutons to math problems. "The existence of [AI technologies] should not make me feel there is another way for students to cheat, but instead embrace that students will have access to these tools in the future," Keeler said. Stll, with risks of misinformaton and discriminaton, in order for AI to be a concrete and safe resource, students and teachers alike must be careful in choosing programs with strict and wellenforced content policies.

In a world growing increasingly reliant on technology, AI, along with its issues of enabling cheatng and spreading prejudice, is unavoidable in the classroom. As students, we are responsible for staying disciplined and avoiding academic dishonesty. We should seek to use these programs as opportunites to enhance our educatonal experience, rather than as shortcuts to the day’s homework assignments. Instead of using ChatGPT to generate essays, for example, we can use it to generate simple explanatons for difcult concepts. It’s also important to exercise cauton on these platorms, as they have few factchecking mechanisms and can easily be reworked to spread misinformaton. Cross-checking informaton with reputable sources and peer-reviewed journals such as Nature for scientfc artcles and Journal of Business Research for fnance and management informaton, while viewing these technologies with a healthy amount of distrust is essental for accurate research. We must be able to draw the line between using technology as an aid to our learning and misusing it to the point where it impedes our growth. ▪