New York City public schools have restricted access to ChatGPT, the AI system that can generate text on a range of topics and in different styles, across school networks and devices. As wide reported this morning and confirmed to TechCrunch by a spokesperson for the New York City Department of Education, the restriction was implemented due to concerns about “[the] negative impacts on student learning” and “safety and accuracy” of content produced by ChatGPT.
“While the tool can provide quick and easy answers to questions, it does not develop critical thinking and problem-solving skills, which are essential for academic and lifelong success,” said the spokesperson to TechCrunch via email, adding that the restricted access came in response to requests from schools.
It is not a prohibition in itself. The New York City public school system uses the same filter to ChatGPT which it uses to block other apps and websites – for example YouTube and Facebook – on school property. Individual schools can request to have ChatGPT unblocked, and the spokesperson said the New York City Department of Education would “welcome” the opportunity to have a conversation with OpenAI, the startup behind ChatGPT, on how the tool could be adapted for education.
Regarding OpenAI, when reached for comment, a company spokesperson said OpenAI was developing “mitigations” to help anyone spot ChatGPT-generated text. It is important. While TechCrunch recently reported that OpenAI was experiment with a watermarking technique for AI-generated text, this is the first time OpenAI has confirmed that it is working on tools specifically to identify text from ChatGPT.
“We made ChatGPT available as a research insight to learn from real-world usage, which we believe is a critical part of developing and deploying high-performance and secure AI systems. We We’re constantly incorporating feedback and lessons learned,” the OpenAI spokesperson said. We’ve always called for transparency around the use of AI-generated text. Our policies require users to be candid with their audience. when they use our API and creative tools… We look forward to working with educators on helpful solutions and other ways to help teachers and students benefit from AI.
ChatGPT He has an aptitude for answering questions on topics ranging from poetry to coding, but one of his biggest flaws is his ability to sometimes give answers which sound convincing but are not actually true. This led The Q&A Stack Overflow coding site to temporarily ban users to share AI-generated content, claiming that ChatGPT made it too easy for users to flood the platform with questionable responses. More recently, the International Conference on Machine Learning, one of the world’s largest conferences on AI and machine learning, announcement a ban on documents containing text generated by ChatGPT and other similar AI systems for fear of “unintended consequences”.
In education, the debate has largely revolved around the potential for cheating. Do a Google search for “ChatGPT for writing school papers” and you’ll find plenty of examples of educators, journalists, and students testing the waters using ChatGPT to complete standardized writing assignments and tests. Joanna Stern, Wall Street Journal columnist used ChatGPT will write an AP essay in English, while Forbes staff member Emma Whitford tapped to complete two college essays in 20 minutes. Speaking to The Guardian, Arizona State University professor Dan Gillmor recalled how he gave ChatGPT one of the assignments he usually gives his students and found the AI essay deserved “a good note”.
Plagiarism is another concern. Like other text-generating AI systems, ChatGPT — which is trained on public data, usually collected without consent — can sometimes regurgitate this information verbatim without citing any source. This includes factual inaccuracies, as discussed earlier, as well as biases – including blatantly racist and sexist perspectives. OpenAI continues to introduce filters and techniques to prevent problematic text builds, but new workarounds are popping up every day.
Despite these limitations and issues, some educators see educational potential in ChatGPT and other forms of generative AI technologies. In a recent article for the Stanford Graduate School of Education website, Victor Lee, an associate professor of education at Stanford, noted that ChatGPT can help students “think in ways they currently don’t. “, for example by helping them to discover and clarify their ideas. Teachers can also benefit from ChatGPT, its premise, by generating many examples for students of a narrative where the basic content remains the same but the style, syntax or grammar differs.
“ChatGPT can [allow] students to read, reflect and revise multiple times without the angst or frustration that such processes often cause, [while] Teachers can use the tool as a way to generate many examples and no examples of one form or genre,” Lee said in a statement. Obviously, teachers are less thrilled with the computer doing a lot of legwork for students. And students still have to learn to write. But how and with what types of writing? A side effect of this new medicine is that it forces us all to ask ourselves these questions and probably to make substantial changes to the overarching goals and methods of our teaching.
Either way, New York City’s public school policy, which appears to be the first of its kind in the nation, will surely force the conversation in school districts elsewhere. As the use of the technology grows – ChatGPT had over 1 million users in December – independent researchers and companies began testing tools to detect the use of AI-generated text in student submissions. Some educators might choose to adopt them, while others, like Lee, encourage the use of ChatGPT as a writing aid instead.
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