We are entering a time of technological domination. Social media has grown to unstoppable heights, the internet is faster than ever, and we are connecting to each other in ways previously unimaginable. As the internet grows from being an optional novelty into a mandatory part of modern life, it truly becomes an inescapable part of our society. In short, the world is undergoing a revolution, and it's difficult to remember what life was like before any of this existed.
One of the most interesting places technology has enacted change is education. The digitization of schools has increased massively during the 21st century; a 2023 school is virtually unrecognizable from one in 2000. Students completing assignments and tests with pen and paper is increasingly fading from normalcy. Instead, the vast majority of schoolwork across private and public schools is now done through use of computers and the internet. Since 2013, LAUSD alone has spent billions of dollars on providing laptops and iPads for all students. Additionally, with the total embrace of online learning systems nationwide like Schoology and Google Classroom, it becomes clear that modern schooling is well on its way to a fully digitized future. This article could focus on the ramifications - both positive and negative - of this electronic shift, but instead I want to look at the specifics. Tackling the entire electronic revolution in schools is too daunting of a task at the moment, as well as one that has been plenty established across the national debate for years. So, I see it best to alternately cover a topic that's relatively new: Artificial Intelligence (namely Chat GPT).
Artificial Intelligence has boldly entered the tech arena over the past decade. As of recent, the world’s largest tech companies - Microsoft, Google, IBM, and others - have made incredible strides in advancing AI. As these companies pioneer machine learning, computer autonomy, and AI art, distinguishing what comes from computers and humans is becoming increasingly difficult by the day. Chat GPT is the newest, and most extreme example of this. Developed by OpenAI, one of the many multi-billion dollar tech companies founded within the last 10 years, Chat GPT is a brand new software designed to assist users in virtually any way possible. Acting essentially as a “virtual assistant”, this versatile Chatbot can perform a wide variety of actions to help make work and everyday life easier. Need to turn a ten page document into a slideshow? - Chat GPT’s got you covered. Need to know what to make for dinner? - input your ingredient list and you’ve got a recipe. Need a piece of writing thoroughly proofread? - type it in and you’ve got an exemplary paper. The Chatbot stands for efficiency, and serves to eliminate some of the mindless busywork people have to endure on the regular.
In the field of education however, the implications of a tool like this have the potential to be far more consequential. As AI technologies like Chat GPT grow increasingly available to the public, students are able to utilize them for school assignments with more ease than ever before. In the hands of Chat GPT, take-home essays and other similar projects now have a whole new level of ease. Simply inputting the prompt of an academic essay into Chat GPT will yield a (mostly) factually correct, and often grammatically pristine piece of writing. Turning in a completely unedited GPT essay raw may arouse some suspicion, but all students need to do to make the writing their own is change a few words here and there, add a few other sentences, and their actions will, in all likelihood, go unnoticeable. This exciting realization for students, yet equally terrifying challenge for teachers, forces education into a wildly new area; one that requires teachers and school districts to start brainstorming proper solutions now, if they at all want to emerge in control of their classes and curriculums.
The appeal of Chat GPT for students is massive. Because the bot offers efficiency in completing time consuming and often arduous assignments, the quick fix it offers can appeal to many different types of students, beyond those who just want to avoid doing work. For a high achieving student with multiple advanced courses on their plate, having a bot to complete the busy work for them might be incredibly enticing, as it may allow them to re-allocate their energy onto assignments and tasks that matter most to them. Having a bot available at all times to complete assignments is an incredibly tempting option, and one that may begin to entice students the more they rely on it. Though using the chatbot to complete mindless busy work or other non-essential assignments may seem fine, using it often can become a slippery slope. Once ChatGPT becomes a regular part of a students work life, they may slowly start using it to complete more and more important assignments, until the vast majority of their work is being done, to whatever extent, by AI. This potential misuse can have serious consequences, both on the way people learn, and on the development of our future generations coming up in school right now. To understand the impact of this new technology more, I talked to 9th, 10th, and 12th grade English teacher at Alexander Hamilton High School, Ms. Colker, who provided a qualified look on the issue from the perspective of someone who deals with it daily.
Ms. Colker is a teacher who stands well-informed, and on the precipice of the AI influenced educational world. In response to Chat GPT, she changed her class curriculum from being primarily computer typed assignments, to entirely handwritten work. Her thinking is that only having handwritten work mitigates the risk of students cheating in her class. Though this works for her, it undoubtedly makes completing assignments more laborious for her students, and makes grading a far more complicated process for her.
“It's basically set my grading process of writing and the students actual physical process of
writing back 20 years.”
Despite these difficulties, she’s more than willing to embrace the challenge to prevent her students from cheating. When I asked if she thinks she’s encountered any AI related cheating from her students she said,
“I haven’t given them very many opportunities to try it.”
Though slightly archaic, her solution to these modern problems does prove effective, and her reasoning behind following these solutions highlights a key point of concern for the role ChatGPT is playing in learning.
“I think, in the wrong hands, Chat GPT is a substitute for actual thinking, organizing, and analyzing; I’m afraid that for students who don’t yet know how to do that, it's going to short circuit that part of their development as students, and as thinkers.”
To be proficient in something, one must first understand the basics, and Ms. Colker highlights a very real fear that ChatGPT may eliminate the fundamental learning that people need to develop in writing. Despite this, she certainly wasn’t entirely hopeless about moving education forward with ChatGPT. She highlighted to me the potential positives the bot can have.
“For people who have already started to master the writing form, I think ChatGPT is going to be super useful; at the university level they are already using it, and I myself am going to use it to generate drafts. But I already know how to write, and I already know my audience, and I already know what I want my writing to do. So I am able to look at AI text with a critical eye, but many of my students can’t do that yet.”
Even with the positives she highlights, the reality that in the wrong hands ChatGPT can be very dangerous to learning still remains. What makes this reality all the more urgent, is that in the current state of public school systems, there is very little regulation to prevent younger students from accessing AI to help write their assignments. In LAUSD, ChatGPT is only blocked on school wifi or an LAUSD email and browser. All someone has to do to access the same benefits is to sign into a new account or go to a public wifi spot. To make matters worse, most middle and high school kids either lack the general self control to not use AI, or don’t understand the importance of doing these assignments on their own. To get on top of this rampant change to education, massive changes and action need to be taken now by school districts to devise realistic and effective ways to get around the artificial intelligence problems. When I spoke about this to Ms. Colker, she explained to me that the introduction of AI to learning is frightening people in a way very similar to when computers were introduced to classrooms, or even when pocket calculators were introduced to math classes. Though she feels hopeful that similar to these past technologies, AI will eventually be phased into schooling in a manageable way that no longer frightens people, she thinks it can only be done if teachers can proactively make necessary changes to the ways they teach.
“Teachers are going to have to be on the cutting edge of how to incorporate this. It's not going to come from above us; it's not going to come from Sacramento, and it's not going to come from Washington. My fear is since we’re already so underfunded, and our class sizes are too large, and all these systematic problems that we’re having, we’re not going to be able to move with the times with this technology, the same way that we haven’t been able to move with the times even with cell phones.”
The problems Ms. Colker, and many other teachers around the country speak of, are indicative of something far more deep rooted. In an education system where teachers are systemically underpaid, and national education budgets are historically underfunded, there are plainly not enough resources available to meaningfully prevent problems like these from causing so much chaos. To make a real difference, much more needs to be changed than administration is willing to see through. Merely prohibiting these issues through blocked domains is no longer enough.
“We have to do more than just prohibit these technologies; we have to learn how to actually benefit from them. I really want to find a way to work with it, but I don't feel like I have the time or the resources to get quiet and get creative, because I think that’s what it’s going to take. I want to, but at the moment I don’t feel like I have the bandwidth; there’s so many more pressing issues.”
The only way to overcome this massive challenge to learning is through learning to work with AI, and incorporating it into school curriculums, much in the same way that we learned to incorporate computers and pocket calculators into education. Ms. Colker is a chief proponent of this idea:
“If we don’t embrace it, it's going to leave us behind”
But as Colker points out, doing this may be impossible in the current version of the education system. Systemic change needs to be taken so that AI doesn't need to be an obstacle to overcome, but a tool to benefit students nationwide. But if this change isn’t taken, the kids of the coming years may be subject to learning in an environment where many of the answers to assignments can easily be given to them without putting much work in at all. The way they learn may be wildly different from the generations before them, and unlike the introduction of computers, it may not be entirely to their benefit. The problem is encompassing, consequential, and will have far reaching impacts. Students are the future. We need to supply them with all the tools they need to succeed, and develop into thoughtful adults. The limitless possibilities of AI threaten to forever alter the way students will grow. Regardless of if you are for it or against it, it would be a mistake to not be involved in the discourse. AI is the future, and just as Ms. Colker so wisely put it, If we don’t learn to embrace it, we will be left behind.
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