ChatGPT: An Educational Breakthrough

Lisette Reinosa-Cervantes, writer

ChatGPT is the latest artificial intelligence chatbot that has been touted as a potential game-changer for online education. With its ability to generate custom essay-style responses to a variety of questions and topics, ChatGPT could have serious implications for students looking to cheat on their homework assignments. 

While using a chatbot might be an enticing prospect for a student in need of a quick answer, teachers will be able to detect if the paper being submitted was created by a machine. The most common way of detecting ChatGPT is to look at the grammar and structure of the essay. ChatGPT-generated essays lack creative writing elements such as descriptions and details that are factual, listing facts without any real analysis or evaluation.

In addition, teachers can use a variety of services to manually check student papers for plagiarism. These services are able to detect if the paper being submitted has been taken from the internet or published elsewhere. Any suspicious papers should then be further scrutinized for signs of tampering or usage of a chatbot system such as ChatGPT. 

Finally, teachers can also instruct their students to make sure that the essay they submit is truly their own work. By using secure authentication methods, such as passwords and time-sensitive one-time codes, the teacher can be certain that the paper submitted was actually written by the student.

As ChatGPT continues to evolve and become more sophisticated, teachers must remain vigilant in order to maintain the integrity of their online classrooms and ensure all papers submitted are original and written by the students themselves. With the right precautions, however, educators and students alike can enjoy the potential benefits of ChatGPT while avoiding any instances of cheating

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Could you tell that was written by ChatGPT? Looking at the grammar and sentence structure alone will not tell you whether or not an article is written by ChatGPT, although the AI makes it seem like it. “If I get a student who just comes to me, and I don’t know who they are,” said Doug Lewin, Vista del Lago High School’s AP Computer Science teacher, “there is no way for me to tell if what they wrote was ChatGPT or not.” 

Some teachers think that they can rely on online tools to detect cheating; however, that is untrue. Out of the five (AI Content detector, GPTZero, GPT-2 Output Detector, ChatGPT – GPT3 Content DetectorAI Content Detector) “ChatGPT detectors” I tested, no website said that the above article was AI-generated, even when I reloaded the website and tried it again. Teachers cannot rely on detectors that are built for certain versions of an ever-evolving machine.  

Teachers are going to have to get a lot more creative with assignments. “You’re going to see a massive jump in two realms,” said Patrick Crean, an Honors 10 English teacher. “You’re going to see more oral exams…you’re also going to see more creative assignments that are going to be slightly weird.” This is the only way that we’re going to ensure that what you’re reading is not AI. Oral exams cannot be cheated on: you’re right in front of the teacher, and you don’t have any outside resources. Short of memorizing an entire essay, you cannot have an AI-generated piece for an oral exam.

All of this begs the question: why do students use ChatGPT to cheat on their essays?  “I think people use [C]hatG[P]T because they are too lazy to do their work, and they want an easy alternative,” said Alexandria Willingham.

At the end of the day, some people will continue to use chatbots to fraud their way through school. “Ignorance is the key to growth, [education], and, in the end, true self-fulfillment. And I believe painstaking hard work is the path,” said Crean. AI will never replicate what a human can do.