AI Enters the Chat

In the fast-paced world of technological advancement, artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as a revolutionary force reshaping various aspects of our lives. One area where AI is making significant inroads is education. With its potential to personalize learning, enhance efficiency, and unlock new opportunities, AI is gradually transforming the landscape of education.

In the modern world, AI is everywhere. Whether it be presented in the form of text, image, or even video, just in the past year large language models like ChatGPT have slowly permeated classrooms around the world, including our own here at St. Christopher’s. Being challenging to detect without the use of an AI identifier like TurnItIn.com, these chatbots have raised some major questions around honor, authenticity and education as a whole. While teachers use sites to detect the credibility of a student’s work, the system is neither fool-proof nor used universally. One can only imagine the number of times since last November, when ChatGPT was launched, that a student has gotten away with a response generated by artificial intelligence. For example, did you notice that the introduction to this article was written by ChatGPT? If you didn’t, consider how a student writing a paper can almost effortlessly use AI to write and generate unoriginal ideas for a prompt. And, while the body of this story took countless hours between interviewing, writing and editing, ChatGPT wrote the introduction in about three seconds.

Here at St. Christopher’s, the vast majority of courses are opposed to AI, and have valid reasoning for such. While ChatGPT was an ever-prevalent force last year in the second semester, students were simply instructed to avoid it altogether. This sentiment is backed by considerable merit, as there have been many Honor Code violations related to uses of AI on pledged assignments. As of the spring of the 2024 school year, the vast majority of cases have been AI-related (a number currently in the -teens), with an epidemic of such infractions coming in the fall upon the submission of English summer essays that were created using ChatGPT.

Inversely, AI isn’t purely negative. Some teachers hope to find a way to incorporate it into their class curriculums, citing that it’s not going away any time soon. Such is especially true in the English and history departments. They are slowly adapting to an embrace of the tool head-on, such as in Mr. Josh Thomas’ World History Honors course with the approval of the students to use the tool to generate cover art for the class’ annual “Assassin's Creed Project.” Teachers are still striving to maintain the originality of students’ work, but recognize AI as the lasting force that it is and will continue to be. Comparing the birth of such a new tool to the advent of computers, Mr. Thomas said, “as faculty members we’re still coming to grips with it [AI], and I think once we’re more comfortable with it we’ll be more more comfortable helping students use it in a safe and effective manner.”

 For example, in these humanities courses, students who use AI as a source in an allowed context must cite it as a traditional source, recognizing that it is information pulled from other corners of the internet. English teacher Mrs. Beth Berry is both optimistic for the future of the resource while also recognizing some of the critical risks it poses. She heads the new AI faculty committee, which meets to discuss recent changes and how teachers can most successfully move forward in their respective courses with the enduring presence of artificial intelligence. Acknowledging this ambivalence, she said, “I think in education we’re still kind of dealing with [finding] that middle ground between, yes, we want to make our lives more efficient and easier, but we don’t want to feel like we’re putting all this into a computer program.”