But enforcing it will be tricky, and AI-generated content isn't going anywhere.
NurPhoto via Getty Images
Will Shanklin
·Contributing Reporter
Fri, January 6, 2023
On Tuesday, New York City public schools banned ChatGPT from school devices and WiFi networks. The artificial intelligence-powered chatbot, released by OpenAI in November, quickly gained a foothold with the public — and drew the ire of concerned organizations. In this case, the worry is that students will stunt their learning by cheating on tests and turning in essays they didn’t write.
ChatGPT (short for “generative pre-trained transformer”) is a startlingly impressive application, a sneak preview of the light and dark sides of AI’s incredible power. Like a text-producing version of AI art (OpenAI is the same company behind DALL-E 2), it can answer fact-based questions and write essays and articles that are often difficult to discern from human-written content. And it will only get harder to tell the difference as the AI improves.
“While the tool may be able to provide quick and easy answers to questions, it does not build critical-thinking and problem-solving skills, which are essential for academic and lifelong success,” Jenna Lyle, a spokesperson for New York City public schools, wrote in an email to NBC News. Still, the organization may have difficulty enforcing the ban. Blocking the chatbot over the school’s internet network and on lent-out devices is easy enough, but that won’t stop students from using it on their own devices with cellular networks or non-school WiFi.
OpenAI is developing “mitigations” it claims will help anyone identify ChatGPT-generated text. Although that’s a welcome move by the Elon Musk-founded startup, recent history isn’t exactly rife with examples of big business putting what’s best for society over the bottom line. (Relying on AI powerhouses to self-regulate sounds as foolproof as trusting the fossil-fuel industry to prioritize the environment over profits.) And artificial intelligence is big business: OpenAI has reportedly been in talks to sell shares at a $29 billion valuation, making it one of the most valuable US startups.
OpenAI logo displayed on a phone screen and ChatGPT website displayed on a laptop screen are seen in this illustration photo taken in Krakow, Poland on December 5, 2022.
(Photo by Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Not everyone in the education community is against the AI chatbot. Adam Stevens, a teacher at Brooklyn Tech who spent years teaching history at NYC’s Paul Robeson High School, compares ChatGPT to the world’s most famous search engine. “People said the same thing about Google 15 or 20 years ago when students could ‘find answers online,’” he told Chalkbeat. He argues that the bot could be an ally for teachers, who could use it as a baseline essay response, which the class could work together to improve upon.
Stevens believes the key is to invite students to “explore things worth knowing” while moving away from standardized metrics. “We’ve trained a whole generation of kids to pursue rubric points and not knowledge,” he said, “and of course, if what matters is the point at the end of the semester, then ChatGPT is a threat.”
No matter how schools handle AI bots, the genie is out of the bottle. Barring government regulation (unlikely in the near future, given the US Congress’ current trajectory), AI-powered answers, essays and art are here to stay. The next part, dealing with the potential societal fallout — including the automation of more and more jobs — will be where the real challenges begin.
Not everyone in the education community is against the AI chatbot. Adam Stevens, a teacher at Brooklyn Tech who spent years teaching history at NYC’s Paul Robeson High School, compares ChatGPT to the world’s most famous search engine. “People said the same thing about Google 15 or 20 years ago when students could ‘find answers online,’” he told Chalkbeat. He argues that the bot could be an ally for teachers, who could use it as a baseline essay response, which the class could work together to improve upon.
Stevens believes the key is to invite students to “explore things worth knowing” while moving away from standardized metrics. “We’ve trained a whole generation of kids to pursue rubric points and not knowledge,” he said, “and of course, if what matters is the point at the end of the semester, then ChatGPT is a threat.”
No matter how schools handle AI bots, the genie is out of the bottle. Barring government regulation (unlikely in the near future, given the US Congress’ current trajectory), AI-powered answers, essays and art are here to stay. The next part, dealing with the potential societal fallout — including the automation of more and more jobs — will be where the real challenges begin.
EXPLAINER: What is ChatGPT and why are schools blocking it?
A ChatGPT prompt is shown on a device near a public school in Brooklyn, New York, Thursday, Jan. 5, 2023. New York City school officials started blocking this week the impressive but controversial writing tool that can generate paragraphs of human-like text
(AP Photo/Peter Morgan)
MATT O'BRIEN
Fri, January 6, 2023 at 12:32 PM MST·5 min read
Ask the new artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT to write an essay about the cause of the American Civil War and you can watch it churn out a persuasive term paper in a matter of seconds.
That's one reason why New York City school officials this week started blocking the impressive but controversial writing tool that can generate paragraphs of human-like text.
The decision by the largest U.S. school district to restrict the ChatGPT website on school devices and networks could have ripple effects on other schools, and teachers scrambling to figure out how to prevent cheating. The creators of ChatGPT say they're also looking for ways to detect misuse.
The free tool has been around for just five weeks but is already raising tough questions about the future of AI in education, the tech industry and a host of professions.
WHAT IS CHATGPT?
ChatGPT launched on Nov. 30 but is part of a broader set of technologies developed by the San Francisco-based startup OpenAI, which has a close relationship with Microsoft.
It's part of a new generation of AI systems that can converse, generate readable text on demand and even produce novel images and video based on what they've learned from a vast database of digital books, online writings and other media.
But unlike previous iterations of so-called “large language models,” such as OpenAI's GPT-3, launched in 2020, the ChatGPT tool is available for free to anyone with an internet connection and designed to be more user-friendly. It works like a written dialogue between the AI system and the person asking it questions.
Millions of people have played with it over the past month, using it to write silly poems or songs, to try to trick it into making mistakes, or for more practical purposes such as helping compose an email. All of those queries are also helping it get smarter.
WHAT ARE THE PITFALLS?
As with similar systems, ChatGPT can generate convincing prose, but that doesn't mean what it says is factual or logical.
Its launch came with little guidance for how to use it, other than a promise that ChatGPT will admit when it's wrong, challenge “incorrect premises” and reject requests meant to generate offensive answers. Since then, however, its popularity has led its creators to try to lower some people's expectations.
“ChatGPT is incredibly limited, but good enough at some things to create a misleading impression of greatness,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said on Twitter in December.
Altman added that “it’s a mistake to be relying on it for anything important right now."
"It’s a preview of progress; we have lots of work to do on robustness and truthfulness.”
CAN IT BE USED FOR WRITING SCHOOL PAPERS?
This is what ChatGPT said when The Associated Press asked it to answer that question in all caps from the perspective of a principal shouting a brief message through a school’s PA system:
“DO NOT USE CHATGPT OR ANY OTHER AUTOMATED WRITING TOOL FOR SCHOOL PAPERS. THIS IS CHEATING AND WILL NOT BE TOLERATED. IF YOU ARE CAUGHT USING CHATGPT OR ANY OTHER AUTOMATED WRITING TOOL FOR SCHOOL PAPERS, THERE WILL BE SERIOUS CONSEQUENCES.”
But when asked to answer the same question on its own, ChatGPT offered this more measured warning: “As a general rule, it is not appropriate to use ChatGPT or any other automated writing tool for school papers, as it is considered cheating and does not benefit the student in the long run."
WHAT DO SCHOOLS SAY?
Many school districts are still scrambling to figure out how to set policies on if and how it can be used.
The New York City education department said Thursday that it's restricting access on school networks and devices because it's worried about negative impacts on student learning, as well as “concerns regarding the safety and accuracy of content.”
But there’s no stopping a student from accessing ChatGPT from a personal phone or computer at home.
"While the tool may be able to provide quick and easy answers to questions, it does not build critical-thinking and problem-solving skills, which are essential for academic and lifelong success,” said schools spokesperson Jenna Lyle.
HUMAN OR AI?
“To determine if something was written by a human or an AI, you can look for the absence of personal experiences or emotions, check for inconsistency in writing style, and watch for the use of filler words or repetitive phrases. These may be signs that the text was generated by an AI.”
That’s what ChatGPT told an AP reporter when asked how to tell the difference.
OpenAI said in a human-written statement this week that it plans to work with educators as it learns from how people are experimenting with ChatGPT in the real world.
“We don’t want ChatGPT to be used for misleading purposes in schools or anywhere else, so we’re already developing mitigations to help anyone identify text generated by that system,” the company said.
DOES THIS THREATEN GOOGLE?
There's been some speculation that ChatGPT could upend the internet search business now dominated by Google, but the tech giant has been working on similar technology for years — it's just more cautious about releasing it in the wild.
It was Google that helped jumpstart the trend for ever-bigger, ever-smarter AI language models that could be “pre-trained” on a wide body of writings. In 2018 the company introduced a system known as BERT that uses a “transformer” technique that compares words across a sentence to predict meaning and context. Some of those advances are now baked into Google searches.
But there's no question that successive iterations of GPT — which stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer — are having an impact. Microsoft has invested at least $1 billion in OpenAI and has an exclusive license to use GPT-3.
HEY CHATGPT, CAN YOU PUT ALL THIS IN A RAP?
"ChatGPT’s just a tool,
But it ain’t no substitute for school.
You can’t cheat your way to the top,
Using a machine to do your homework, you’ll flop.
Plagiarism’s a no-no,
And ChatGPT’s text is not your own, yo.
So put in the work, earn that grade,
Don’t try to cheat, it’s not worth the trade."
Fri, January 6, 2023 at 12:32 PM MST·5 min read
Ask the new artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT to write an essay about the cause of the American Civil War and you can watch it churn out a persuasive term paper in a matter of seconds.
That's one reason why New York City school officials this week started blocking the impressive but controversial writing tool that can generate paragraphs of human-like text.
The decision by the largest U.S. school district to restrict the ChatGPT website on school devices and networks could have ripple effects on other schools, and teachers scrambling to figure out how to prevent cheating. The creators of ChatGPT say they're also looking for ways to detect misuse.
The free tool has been around for just five weeks but is already raising tough questions about the future of AI in education, the tech industry and a host of professions.
WHAT IS CHATGPT?
ChatGPT launched on Nov. 30 but is part of a broader set of technologies developed by the San Francisco-based startup OpenAI, which has a close relationship with Microsoft.
It's part of a new generation of AI systems that can converse, generate readable text on demand and even produce novel images and video based on what they've learned from a vast database of digital books, online writings and other media.
But unlike previous iterations of so-called “large language models,” such as OpenAI's GPT-3, launched in 2020, the ChatGPT tool is available for free to anyone with an internet connection and designed to be more user-friendly. It works like a written dialogue between the AI system and the person asking it questions.
Millions of people have played with it over the past month, using it to write silly poems or songs, to try to trick it into making mistakes, or for more practical purposes such as helping compose an email. All of those queries are also helping it get smarter.
WHAT ARE THE PITFALLS?
As with similar systems, ChatGPT can generate convincing prose, but that doesn't mean what it says is factual or logical.
Its launch came with little guidance for how to use it, other than a promise that ChatGPT will admit when it's wrong, challenge “incorrect premises” and reject requests meant to generate offensive answers. Since then, however, its popularity has led its creators to try to lower some people's expectations.
“ChatGPT is incredibly limited, but good enough at some things to create a misleading impression of greatness,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said on Twitter in December.
Altman added that “it’s a mistake to be relying on it for anything important right now."
"It’s a preview of progress; we have lots of work to do on robustness and truthfulness.”
CAN IT BE USED FOR WRITING SCHOOL PAPERS?
This is what ChatGPT said when The Associated Press asked it to answer that question in all caps from the perspective of a principal shouting a brief message through a school’s PA system:
“DO NOT USE CHATGPT OR ANY OTHER AUTOMATED WRITING TOOL FOR SCHOOL PAPERS. THIS IS CHEATING AND WILL NOT BE TOLERATED. IF YOU ARE CAUGHT USING CHATGPT OR ANY OTHER AUTOMATED WRITING TOOL FOR SCHOOL PAPERS, THERE WILL BE SERIOUS CONSEQUENCES.”
But when asked to answer the same question on its own, ChatGPT offered this more measured warning: “As a general rule, it is not appropriate to use ChatGPT or any other automated writing tool for school papers, as it is considered cheating and does not benefit the student in the long run."
WHAT DO SCHOOLS SAY?
Many school districts are still scrambling to figure out how to set policies on if and how it can be used.
The New York City education department said Thursday that it's restricting access on school networks and devices because it's worried about negative impacts on student learning, as well as “concerns regarding the safety and accuracy of content.”
But there’s no stopping a student from accessing ChatGPT from a personal phone or computer at home.
"While the tool may be able to provide quick and easy answers to questions, it does not build critical-thinking and problem-solving skills, which are essential for academic and lifelong success,” said schools spokesperson Jenna Lyle.
HUMAN OR AI?
“To determine if something was written by a human or an AI, you can look for the absence of personal experiences or emotions, check for inconsistency in writing style, and watch for the use of filler words or repetitive phrases. These may be signs that the text was generated by an AI.”
That’s what ChatGPT told an AP reporter when asked how to tell the difference.
OpenAI said in a human-written statement this week that it plans to work with educators as it learns from how people are experimenting with ChatGPT in the real world.
“We don’t want ChatGPT to be used for misleading purposes in schools or anywhere else, so we’re already developing mitigations to help anyone identify text generated by that system,” the company said.
DOES THIS THREATEN GOOGLE?
There's been some speculation that ChatGPT could upend the internet search business now dominated by Google, but the tech giant has been working on similar technology for years — it's just more cautious about releasing it in the wild.
It was Google that helped jumpstart the trend for ever-bigger, ever-smarter AI language models that could be “pre-trained” on a wide body of writings. In 2018 the company introduced a system known as BERT that uses a “transformer” technique that compares words across a sentence to predict meaning and context. Some of those advances are now baked into Google searches.
But there's no question that successive iterations of GPT — which stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer — are having an impact. Microsoft has invested at least $1 billion in OpenAI and has an exclusive license to use GPT-3.
HEY CHATGPT, CAN YOU PUT ALL THIS IN A RAP?
"ChatGPT’s just a tool,
But it ain’t no substitute for school.
You can’t cheat your way to the top,
Using a machine to do your homework, you’ll flop.
Plagiarism’s a no-no,
And ChatGPT’s text is not your own, yo.
So put in the work, earn that grade,
Don’t try to cheat, it’s not worth the trade."
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