AKRON, Ohio — More artificial intelligence is making its way into Northeast Ohio schools and while the technology can be helpful, it can also be used to cheat the system. It’s why Chat GPT and other chatbots are now creating concerns for teachers.
Michael Graham, a University of Akron history professor, says he is hearing about Chat GPT more and more in his classroom. The new technology allows you to ask it nearly anything and generates a response by drawing on information from all over the internet. Graham says students have been using the app to complete assigned papers.
“One of the skills we try to develop in a college-level history course is writing and obviously, if you're having a bot do your writing for you, you're not developing those skills,” he said. “What I found kind of alarming was that you know, it could write a competent, boring B paper, you know, something I might give a B-minus to or something sort of bland, but grammatically [it’s] okay.”
Graham says it wasn’t hard to spot the misuse as the AI app told on itself. As he explained, “you can actually take a couple of sentences from the paper, type it in the chat GPT and ask Chat GPT, did you write this, and chat GPT will answer.”
While Graham points out the bad, he also recognizes the good that could come from this software. Some of his students have told him it has actually helped them to better understand some of his coursework.
“In one of my classes, we look at some 17th-century Scottish legal documents which are written in Scots dialect,” Graham said. “What one of them found was he could enter a block of text from one of these legal documents in Chat GPT and it would translate it into modern English for him, which I think is a great tool.”
Our News 5 team spoke with Cleveland State University (CSU) students about Chat GPT. Many of them had more benefits to add.
Gloria Nzoh-Ndem, a first-year student at CSU, told us, “it's like Google but better.” She added, “the AI pools information from different sites and just like summarizes it for you. Whereas if I was to go through that research by myself, it would be more time-consuming and I would end up getting confused.”
However, others we spoke to feel it does more harm than good.
“I think it makes us lazy,” said Aditya Marriputi, a master's student at CSU. “If we do our assignments and homework on the Chat GPT, how are we going to perform on the test?”
With technology changing every day, Graham says educators must always be ready to adjust. He says he is more concerned for teachers at the high school level. News 5 reached out to several local school districts to see if they've had any problems. Akron Public Schools responded saying so far, this is not an issue in their district. Yet, officials say the first step to preventing it is changing school board policy to reflect the rise of artificial intelligence use
“We just have to make it our friend and not our enemy,” said Graham.
