“I think that calculators are more similar to spellcheck than this,” said Edgerton High School English teacher Sue White. “This feels different because people are tricked into thinking that it can think.”
ChatGPT, which can be accessed online, allows users to ask a question or submit a prompt and receive an artificial intelligence-generated response. The language model, launched in November, is “capable of generating human-like text based on context and past conversations,” according to its developer, OpenAI.
Mars Subola, who teaches English at Madison East High School, described themself as somewhat naive about the artificial intelligence chatbot throughout the last school year. That changed in the year’s final weeks, as Subola noticed a “huge influx of writing that just didn’t seem like my kids’ writing.”
Subola discovered that more than a dozen students had ChatGPT write their papers for them.
“It just kind of felt like … they didn’t have the trust in themselves or in myself that we could create a solution to whatever problem they were facing,” Subola said. “They didn’t have to resort to ChatGPT and it just felt like these are really, really, really talented, intelligent, skilled writers who found a way out, I guess.”