School is a major stress for many Huntley High School students. Considering all the sports, clubs, and extracurriculars students take on as part of their daily schedule, there is just no time for studying, essays, or homework. If only someone, or something, could help ease the pressure.
Students all over the country have turned to ChatGPT, Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer, an artificial intelligence chatbot that can generate human-like responses to pretty much anything, including homework answers and well-typed essays. However, teachers are well prepared for this issue.
“As teachers, we learn to recognize the voices of our students in their writing,” English department head Shaina Pocztowski said. “Teachers get very good at being able to know whether the student sitting in front of them every day for 47 minutes is the same person who wrote the essay.”
Teachers have become very good at recognizing a student’s work vs. someone else’s. Cheating increased significantly over the past couple of years, specifically with the pandemic.
During the spread of COVID-19, plagiarism and cheating was a major problem. Since students could hide their phones under their cameras, many used apps such as Photomath and Sparknotes on assignments and tests. This problem had infuriated teachers everywhere; no one could trust one another.
Teachers know better now. Even during that time, teachers used a website called LiteSpeed, which allowed them to view students’ screens at any given time. The website helped catch many cheaters during that time; but only when students cheated on their Chromebooks. It was a lost cause when it came to catching cheaters on their phones.
Soon enough, ChatGPT became an issue. The school began using a website called Google Backdraft. With Backdraft, teachers could see the writing and editing process of a paper in a video format. This made it easier to see if students copied and pasted anything onto their document.
“It will actually play through what happened in Google like a video,” assistant principal Shelly Kish said. “So for example, if a paragraph was copied and pasted, you can see that all of a sudden, a whole paragraph or chunk of paper would show up.”
With all of these websites to prevent it, it appears that ChatGPT is only good for plagiarizing and cheating. However, some teachers and many students argue that while it can be used as a device for cheating, it can also be an efficient learning tool.
“I think it can be used as a great tool to spark some ideas for writing,” sophomore Aleigha Nielsen said. “However, I think some do abuse the power of it.”
ChatGPT is an extremely powerful AI website. Not only can it write essays and answer problems, but it can write songs and stories, have philosophical conversations, create jokes, and so much more. For example, some students who enjoy creative writing can ask ChatGPT to give them a prompt or help English students who need a complicated book explained to them.
On the other hand, some students argue that ChatGPT is unreliable for academic-related tasks.
“It’s a very rudimentary AI, and there’s a lot of other AIs out there that are more complex, receptive, and overall better to use.” junior Scott Krelle said.
It appears that although ChatGPT can be used as an effective tool to spark ideas, or further understand a lesson or book, it is highly recommended that it not be used to answer homework questions or write essays, and should tread lightly while using it.
