As the new school year starts, many schools are still unsure if chatbots can be helpful or harmful, but will students still use them either way?
Chatbots and AI are not a new concept, especially not to students, many of whom have already been using the software since early 2022. But as these programs have become more prominent, schools now have to make their decisions on how to handle it.
Chatbots are websites powered by Artificial Intelligence, or AI, that can be given a request or prompt and then can scour the internet to fulfill this. One of the most popular chatbots is ChatGPT. These chatbots have great abilities to solve test questions, quiz students in Spanish or even write full essays. But how helpful is this? Many schools are torn as, considering this is such new technology, it is difficult to set the boundaries on when and how to use them constructively.
Some school districts, like Los Angeles Unified, the US’s second largest school district, have automatically blocked or banned chatbots because they are too hard to control or manage and do not aid to student’s learning at all. They believe that chatbots are unreliable, make students lazy and harm students’ growth.
None of this is untrue but nor is it all fact. Chatbots can often be unreliable because “like a child using Google or Wikipedia, ChatGPT is kind of a super child accessing the entire internet to come up with its material,” said CBS News, which is a great way to describe it. Like a child, chatbots can access as much information as they can find but they do not have the knowledge to know what is true, reliable or important information.
But on the other hand, chatbots can be helpful for simple or repetitive practice in classrooms. Instead of a teacher quizzing students on vocabulary, which can be tedious, they can divert this task to AI whilst they focus on creating and teaching new material.
Staff and students from our school have their own opinions on chatbots and artificial intelligence in the classrooms.
Mrs. Perry, a world history 1 and 2 teacher is torn on chatbots, especially in a subject like history. It can surely be helpful for studying and reviewing but what will happen when it fails? Can we rely on AI?
Mr. Valenti, another history teacher, is worried about misinformation and thinks that government action is needed.
An important distinction to make here is between misinformation and disinformation:
Misinformation is incorrect information that is not known to be incorrect by the provider.
Disinformation is information that is incorrect but is intentionally known to be untrue by the provider.
The problem here is that AI has no ability to identify misinformation or disinformation but also has no intent to spread incorrect information.
Mrs. Whitfield, another history teacher, thinks “all tools, if used with fidelity, can be used well if teachers learn to use them.” This is a very important part of any new technology, as youth tend to easily learn and adapt whilst adults are slower to this. Whitfield also thinks that by having such an easy way to discover information and get help, it becomes harder for students to ask real people for help. A good example of this outside of school is food delivery apps like Doordash or Grubhub. It has become so easy to get our food to us with no human interaction that ordering a meal or asking questions face to face with a real person will become difficult for coming generations.
Ms, Fatimi works with special education students and teachers and thinks that although AI has its downsides it also can be quite helpful in adapting materials and lessons for students with special needs. Many teachers already use Google Translate when communicating with students who speak other languages, which can also often be unreliable with grammar.
Finally, Mrs. McPhie is an English teacher at our school who thinks that “students will have a rude awakening” when they get to college and realize that ChatGPT won’t get them through. She also has had to move to more assignments on paper to help decrease the chance of chatbot plagiarism. This is quite unfortunate because not only is using so much paper harsh on the environment, it requires more work for staff and students as well. She also thinks that teachers and administrators can’t pretend that this isn’t a problem because it is. Students already are using chatbots, and turning a blind eye to that fixes nothing.
Chatbots and AI have quite different consequences and effects in different subjects. For example, math has clear formulas and rules to follow so it is much easier to get a good result from AI, but a class like science or English depends more on what you, yourself are doing.
Overall, chatbots in schools can be helpful in reviewing and making student and staff’s lives easier but it is often unreliable and hard to correctly master. Something else to ponder: what will happen when AI breaks down?
