Why Teachers Are Afraid of ChatGPT - Artificial Intelligence

Megan Hayes | News Editor

Artificial intelligence chatbots have been around for a while, but now there is a new contender in the field called ChatGPT, an AI chatbot with extremely accurate and human-sounding logic. ChatGPT, designed by OpenAI, was launched in November of 2022 and has taken the world by storm. It is now beginning to be used widely by young people because of its accurate ability to maintain a conversation and give proper context to prior topics, just like a person would, and for its varying ability to perform tasks. It uses Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), a language model that helps AI to better understand words. A snippet is included below about how exactly this works, sourced from ChatGPT itself by HuggingFace.co.

ChatGPT, with its amazing ability to sound so humanlike, is now being used to write things like student’s essays, screenplays, poems, songs, music, and to answer test questions (sometimes better than a human could!), but this is causing a huge fear for teachers. Rightfully so, teachers are afraid of students using AI to write their papers or do their tests, as there is sometimes no way to know whether or not it is a genuine, human-written response. Students enter in a prompt, take the response, clean it up, and send it in for grading– completely disregarding anything that one may learn or gain experience from in writing an essay.

This is posing an even bigger threat, however, to major-specific classes which have information that is crucial for the student to know. If used, this can completely undermine the basis of teaching and even going to school, as the work and effort is not being put in by the students. This may feel like a godsend to students in times of need, but let’s say if medical students start using it, that can cause HUGE issues. Obviously, if students aren’t learning that is one thing, but going into jobs that can severely harm human life if not done right is an extremely serious matter. Hopefully, those who use ChatGPT are not medical students, and medical malpractice finds its way to those who are putting both themselves and others at risk by taking the easy way out of assignments.

Schools are aiming to ban ChatGPT and some are starting to push the usage of this AI into grounds of Academic Misconduct. However, there is still much speculation about how exactly teachers and administration are going to catch students. Teachers, some of whom use ChatGPT for things like lesson plans, are also starting to worry about the necessity of their jobs. The AI can sometimes produce a more detailed and fun lesson plan than the teachers can think of, leaving the resonating question of “Am I really necessary anymore?”

The revolutionary usage of AI can bring both positives and negatives, but right now a lot of fear is overwhelming the usage of this platform. It truly can be used for good, and demonstrates a huge advancement in technology as well as artificial intelligence, but also brings about the threat of an abundance of changes to our everyday lives, especially for those in school.