Artifcial Intelligence: A virus infecting learning

Vivian Collins ’24 News Editor

Trends are common in high school: TikTok dances, fdget spinners, and now Stanley Cups. But, the most unprecedented trend that’s been sweeping through the hallways of LM is artifcial intelligence (AI). The new accessibility to services that can write essays, complete lines of code, and carry out conversations, have become extremely tempting for students. Within the past few months, teachers have observed an alarming increase in the amount of plagiarized work being submitted, all thanks to AI. The sites are free, and most do not even require the user to make an account. All one has to do is supply a prompt and wait a couple seconds for a response. The most well-known, and possibly most advanced, AI site is ChatGPT.

ChatGPT launched in late November of 2022 by OpenAI with the goal of changing the way humans connect with computers. OpenAI is a company that focuses on the integration of AGI (artifcial generalized intelligence) into the modern day workplace. AGI was designed to complete the same cognitive functions that humans are capable of, such as solving a series of math problems. The website functions as a conversation between the user and the AI. ChatGPT interacts with the user by answering questions, refuting false information, and even identifying its own errors. A system this advanced not only has the ability to ignore queries about illegal actions, but can also cite its sources, making it much more difcult for teachers to identify.

While ChatGPT is certainly a step forward in the scientifc world, the world of education shows a prime example of its consequences. English department chair Brian Mays states that “it’s defnitely going to erode our ability to think critically and just think in general.” Mays has found examples of students turning in work that’s been generated by an AI service saying, “I have a pretty good sense of my students as writers and their vocabulary and sentence structure and just general writing patterns so, when something feels of, I have a sort of feeling about it. It’s hard to prove, but it’s at least a start.” Mays adds that sites such as ChatGPT have basic writing styles so the work they produce is very similar, which is another way that he can tell when work has not been written by a student.

Despite teachers having ways of discovering the use of AI, students continue to visit the sites. English 2H and Film & Literature teacher Meredith Dyson thinks that a way to combat the use of AI is to remove the motivation behind it, claiming that a major reason students turn to AI is because “they feel like they have to.” She proposes changing the way assignments are evaluated, stating that, “There’s value in the process…If we can see the process and reward the process of learning, I think that’s good for education.” Dyson suggests that, at least in an English classroom, focusing more on the process rather than the fnal product could be a more accurate way to grade students, especially when the fnal product can be fabricated in a matter of minutes.

ChatGPT is not blocked on any LMSD one to one laptop, meaning students have easy access to the AI on computers provided by LM. When asked if he thought that text generating softwares including ChatGPT should be blocked, Mays said he did not and that it’s important for teachers to have access to the sites, stating, “Instead of trying to bury our heads in the sand, I think it’s useful to play around with it, see what it’s capable of, and perhaps even integrate it into our classrooms for certain things if necessary, much like one does with a calculator or other forms in other disciplines.”

Even if the site does get blocked, many students still have other devices that will provide access. Dyson believes blocking the site, “would be a good idea to make it very clear that we don’t want students using it, but I don’t know that that would make much of a diference, practically speaking.”

So, what does this mean for teaching moving forward? Both Mays and Dyson have used ChatGPT to better understand its function, capabilities, and limits. Dyson states that, “One of the things we talked about as an English department is that you can only get a good quality response out of it by talent. You have to kind of direct it and tell it how to revise and make it better and that could even be something we could one day use as a tool to help students think about the revision process.” Artifcial intelligence is not something that’s going away and not something that can be completely censored from students. Instead of running from it, LM teachers aim to adapt to it, bettering the education of their students and preparing them for the everchanging future.