Will AI change education as we know it?

A student turns in his essay. Having spent the previous night writing it, he finishes and turns in his assignment feeling accomplished and fulfilled. The next day, his teacher emails him telling him that his essay has been nullified  because it has been detected as A.I. written. This is the predicament schools are in.

A growing issue concerning essay writing in schools is the sudden influx of A.I. capable of generating essays, which students have been utilizing to turn in essays.

Ever since the launch of ChatGPT in November of last year, many teachers have reported that essays well beyond a students’ capabilities have been turned in; it was easy to discern that they were all A.I. generated. Because of the long amount of time and dedication required for writing an essay, many students have skipped the process entirely. Instead, they insert their essay prompt into ChatGPT, or any other essay writing A.I., and turn in the result to their teachers. Their argument has been that the A.I. programs were “resources” that they were allowed to use and that they broke no school rules by doing so. 

To counter this downpour of A.I. generated essays, there have been programmers who have made A.I. generated essay detectors, notably Originality and Winston A.I. These programs detect A.I. generated texts by comparing them to already generated A.I. essays and detecting similarities. The issue? They have started marking human written essays as A.I. written. These incidents happen randomly and are likely the result of the A.I. falsely identifying similar wording in the essays. Regardless, these incidents have cost students their grades and the ongoing development of A.I. programs only make detecting them more difficult and tedious for teachers. Teachers have been at an impasse on the subject of A.I. as they find it difficult to completely eliminate its use or to rework their assignments in a way to prevent students from using the programs.

What does this have in store for schools? Well, it will likely continue causing issues for teachers. Dan Gillmor, a journalism professor at Arizona State University, gave one of the A.I. programs a prompt he had given his students. When the results came back, Gillmor said grimly that “[He] would have given this a good grade” and that “Academia has some very serious issues to confront.”

The issues with A.I. generated work has been ongoing for the last year. Regarding issues especially related to students, teachers have tried adopting the style of accepting and incorporating A.I. instead of outright rejecting it. The results of the following year, as A.I. develops even further, will prove whether it will be detrimental or helpful to schools around the globe.

* Image from pixabay.com/illustrations/artificial-intelligence-art-robot-7965589/