ChatGPT Takes Education By Storm

Justin Snay

When users open the ChatGPT website, they come across this welcome page.

“Italy was a deeply Catholic country during World War II, with approximately 90% of the population identifying as Catholic,” ChatGPT version of the essay said. “The role of Italian Catholics in the war was complex and varied, reflecting the diverse beliefs and actions of individuals and groups within the Catholic community.”

The student version of the essay had more character in its introduction. 

“The Nazis almost completely overtook Europe,” the student version of the essay said. “Whether directly through conquering or through political scare, Hitler almost dominated every aspect of European life. One voice that continued to pierce through the ever-increasing destruction of the Nazi Regime was the Catholic Church.”

Students like senior Emily Cole say ChatGPT is just another cheating tool. 

“I think it’s just like any other cheating method,” Cole said. “Those who would’ve found a way to take a shortcut will take it, and those who would’ve done the work will put in the work. It is slightly tempting knowing it’s there, and it’s aggravating knowing my classmates didn’t have to put more than five minutes of work into a paper that took me hours.”

ChatGPT has attracted millions of users daily. It took five days for ChatGPT to reach one million users. In comparison, it took Facebook 10 months to reach one million users, and Netflix took about three and a half years to reach the same amount. ChatGPT has 100 million monthly active users. 

Following Microsoft’s $10 billion investment, Microsoft announced that they would integrate ChatGPT into Bing and Edge.

Many students like Cole seem to dislike ChatGPT. Cole said that she couldn’t see any reason why it could be good. 

“ChatGPT can make it harder to trace plagiarism and will teach kids that important values such as integrity and hard work don’t pay off,” Cole said. “After all, why work hard at something when someone else can cheat and achieve the same outcome?” 

The English department at LHS says that they are trying many ways to get rid of the prospect of using AI for assignments or essays. They said they are trying to use more in-class writing, teach the process of writing, which includes drafting and revision, and even have students handwrite papers. AP English and English 10 teacher Grace Scott recently had an assignment for her English 10 Honors class to write an essay about genocide. Scott said that ChatGPT does not necessarily make it harder to grade essays and assignments. 

“If a teacher knows their student’s writing style and vocabulary level, it should be fairly easy to spot an inauthentic essay,” Scott said. “Also, if research and APA citations are required, and they are missing, that would be an immediate red flag to me. But who knows, I may have been fooled by this technology already.” 

English teacher Nathan Hedrick said that he has been keeping up with ChatGPT since he first learned about it a couple of months ago. 

“At first, I thought it was just another weird little chatbot toy, but then I saw a Tiktok where this guy showed how it could actually create computer code,” Hendrick said.  

Everyone is able to use ChatGPT or any AI chatbot for that matter. This is when Hendrick realized AI had gotten big. 

“People have said before that ‘There are still tons of jobs that could never be replaced by AI,’” Hendrick said. “They include teachers in this, and I always thought computer programmers would be safe too, but not anymore. If these bots can think and respond as humans do, there isn’t really any industry that is safe from obsolescence, including education. At a certain point with capitalism, you have to use the cheapest option, including replacing human labor. So how does that affect my job right now? It doesn’t. But it might very well erase it completely in the not-too-distant future.”