It’s hard to believe that ChatGPT and other AI platforms have become a standard practice for many students and adults, even though it has really only been around for two and a half years. ChatGPT went public in November 2022, right after the graduating class of 2023 at Clark Magnet High School turned in their senior papers. Senior English teachers at Clark changed the way the senior paper was written from then on. “Once students left the classroom and worked on their essays at home, it was clear that for a large majority of students, it was AI or ChatGPT-generated writing rather than authentic student work being submitted for a grade,” Narine Tatevosian, English Department Chair, said.
There is a definitive shift that took place, and despite the fact that students were already disgruntled and dragging their feet to read and write, ChatGPT going public and becoming very easily accessible proved that over time, this would become a new obstacle that the world would be required to take on and overcome.
So, what does all of this mean for students and parents in our community? Students being stressed out about grades and GPA is not a revelation to anyone. That said, the highly competitive students, who would typically be the most studious students in the past, are now feeling pressured to jump on board the AI train. There are certainly those students still fighting the good fight of honest education that they legitimately acquire through hard work, reading, studying, and dedication to the content, but it is becoming increasingly difficult to identify and meet those students.
Adults in the real world, as well as students in classrooms, have fallen into a habit of turning to AI platforms to think and write for them if and when possible. Using AI is only a temporary, superficial solution to a problem, though. A population of students who use AI to earn a good grade is certainly possible, however, this is inevitably going to result in them not being prepared for a test that reflects their actual understanding of the material. It’s easy to give in and conform to this seemingly new norm, but as a society, we need to accept that we will likely pay the price for this in the near future.
Typically, when teens use AI or ChatGPT, they legitimately believe they are working smart, not hard. Most of them would probably not admit that it comes from a place of laziness or apathy. That said, by not practicing valuable life skills like reading, writing, analyzing, and processing information on their own, and instead relying on these types of AI platforms, the underlying problem remains that they will not actually learn those skills critical for their future success. By not legitimately pushing themselves, students are ruining their chances at self-development and self-improvement from a young age.
Copying and pasting an essay from ChatGPT doesn’t prove that any skills or knowledge have been acquired. Grades based on assignments that could easily be manipulated with these platforms are an inauthentic representation of a student’s knowledge. Identity and self-worth are shaped heavily in teen and adolescent years. The person that a student wants to become is being shaped starting as early as high school. ChatGPT leads to a dishonest lifestyle, causing one to never become fully independent.
The competition between authentic students and their dishonest counterparts creates burnout for the students who legitimately intend to learn. The pressure to compete with a computer inevitably pushes even the best students to question whether they should do their work on their own. More and more research is coming out to show the burnout that students face because of their reliance on these tools.
Although there are AI checkers, many are unreliable or don’t detect accurately what was used. That said, teachers can often identify student ability based on the skills that they show in class through class discussion, in-class writing tasks, short answer responses on tests, and much more. The point shouldn’t be to find ways to catch the cheaters. The main problem is how detrimental this is to the students and society at large.
At what point do the parents come into this already complex equation? Many parents struggled to understand the severity and punishments students were given for plagiarism before AI became an issue. Even when work was evidently copied and pasted from an online source authored by a different individual, parents would defend their students and say it was used as research, not that their student was cheating or copying the material.
For decades, teachers worked to explain to students and parents alike that copy-pasting any amount of information from any text was unethical because students were trying to claim those sentences or passages as their own. AI is a completely new and confusing concept because work is not attributed to a different human being in the world. The concept of using AI to “cheat” is a bit more abstract and, at times, probably hard to fully grasp because people confuse it with a similar practice of “Googling” questions.
It’s gotten increasingly difficult for parents to keep up with this problem as new technological platforms continue evolving. Once parents believe they are caught up for a short period of time they fall out of the loop once again. Most parents likely use grades as their metric to determine if their kids are doing well in school, not realizing that it may no longer be the right way to draw that conclusion they were able to in the past.
So, where do we go from here? AI is here to stay, so the goal isn’t to try to find a way to ban it or get rid of it, since the genie is out of the bottle and it is not going back. AI can be beneficial if used as a tool, but certainly not to replace thinking and learning. It is only when people accept the true reality of this situation that they will recognize that it is ultimately up to them to make their life choices. They can, of course, use AI as often as they’d like, but the more they use it to replace critical thinking and the necessary practice of valuable skills, the less capable they will become as adults in the real world.
