the way ideas are generated

How are schools responding to ChatGPT?

With the capability for generating responses to school questions and essays, ChatGPT has caused many teachers to reconsider how they implement their assignments. Lilley said that when her seniors first told her about the program in AP English Literature, they began working together to test how the engine would respond to class essay prompts.

“It was shocking that it sort of made sense,” Lilley said. “You could tell it was kind of soulless, but it was fine. That’s kind of amazing and scary at the same time.” Lilley is not worried that the AI will impact her English class, as she says that preparation for the AP exam in May will be mostly handwritten essays in class which cannot be plagiarized. However, she recognizes that other teachers may not be so fortunate.“I expect that our assignments will diversify accordingly, and teachers will be more careful about assignments that can be easily perpetrated by ChatGPT,” Lilley said.

At Trinity, Podchaski is in charge of researching and presenting information about ChatGPT, and his process of determining how Trinity should handle the new AI followed the same protocol as any other technological review. Podchaski said that he ultimately decided to block the software on school wifi due to privacy and legal concerns about the age requirements, until further research could be done. Frederick said that she and Podchaski are working with computer science professors at UCF in order to talk about policies being made at the higher education level and possibly model and advise how Trinity creates policies for the program in the future.

Lilley said that she is also collaborating with her English colleagues at UCF to discuss how assignments should be formatted in order to avoid the potential for plagiarism. However, Lilley says that regardless of policies, prevention can only go so far. “I really believe that who you are really cheating is youself when you don’t do your own work because that is how you grow as an intellect and as a future professional,” Lilley said. Although the current model of ChatGPT sometimes produces inaccurate statements and uses unreliable sources, teachers, students and professionals are hopeful about the future as the program improves with the additional data it receives daily from the open beta program.

What will ChatGPT look like in the future?

“The possibilities are there to make [ChatGPT] very, very accurate,” Frederick said. “[But] our Trinity students are too smart and have too much to offer the world to start relying on some artificial intelligence.”

The owner of ChatGPT has already made announcements on social media of a paid version being released that can even be customized for individual companies using their own data entries and training, further increasing the potential accuracy and applications of the program.

“The basic technology that’s predictive text will never be able to properly mimic a human voice because part of the uniqueness of each of us is [that] we have our own foibles in speaking and writing,” Podchaski said.