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Social robots can teach, help and keep people company. What would it take for machines to form real friendships with people? And do we even want that?

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Ban or Embrace? Colleges Wrestle With A.I.-Generated Admissions Essays.

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A.I. chatbots could facilitate plagiarism on college applications or democratize student access to writing help. Or maybe both.

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Bobrow, E. (2023). Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/education/2023/aug/27/chatgpt-ai-disadvantaged-college-applicants-affirmative-action

Hulick, K. (2023). Retrieved from https://www.sciencenews.org/article/chatgpt-ai-artificial-intelligence-education-cheating-accuracy

Hulick, K. (2023). Retrieved from https://www.snexplores.org/article/social-robot-friend-companion-artificial-intelligence.

Rehkopf, C. (2023). Retrieved from https://machronicle.com/over-a-quarter-of-students-report-using-chatgpt-to-complete-assignments/

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"We need to talk," Brett Vogelsinger said. A student had just asked for feedback on an essay. One paragraph stood out. Vogelsinger, a ninth grade English teacher in Doylestown, Pa., realized that the student hadn't written the piece himself. He had used ChatGPT.

The artificial intelligence tool, made available for free late last year by the company OpenAI, can reply to simple prompts and generate essays and stories. It can also write code.

Within a week, it had more than a million users. As of early 2023, Microsoft planned to invest $10 billion into OpenAI, and OpenAI's value had been put at $29 billion, more than double what it was in 2021.

It's no wonder other tech companies have been racing to put out competing tools. Anthropic, an AI company founded by former OpenAI employees, is testing a new chatbot called Claude. Google launched Bard in early February, and the Chinese search company Baidu released Ernie Bot in March.

A lot of people have been using ChatGPT out of curiosity or for entertainment. I asked it to invent a silly excuse for not doing homework in the style of a medieval proclamation. In less than a second, it offered me: "Hark! Thy servant was beset by a horde of mischievous leprechauns, who didst steal mine quill and parchment, rendering me unable to complete mine homework."

But students can also use it to cheat. ChatGPT marks the beginning of a new wave of AI, a wave that's poised to disrupt education.

When Stanford University's student-run newspaper polled students at the university, 17 percent said they had used ChatGPT on assignments or exams at the end of 2022. Some admitted to submitting the chatbot's writing as their own. For now, these students and others are probably getting away with it. That's because ChatGPT often does an excellent job.

"It can outperform a lot of middle school kids," Vogelsinger says. He might not have known his student had used it, except for one thing: "He copied and pasted the prompt."

The essay was still a work in progress, so Vogelsinger didn't see it as cheating. Instead, he saw an opportunity. Now, the student and AI are working together. ChatGPT is helping the student with his writing and research skills.

"[We're] color-coding," Vogelsinger says. The parts the student writes are in green. The parts from ChatGPT are in blue. Vogelsinger is helping the student pick and choose a few sentences from the AI to expand on - and allowing other students to collaborate with the tool as well. Most aren't turning to it regularly, but a few kids really like it. Vogelsinger thinks the tool has helped them focus their ideas and get started.

This story had a happy ending. But at many schools and universities, educators are struggling with how to handle ChatGPT and other AI tools.

In early January, New York City public schools banned ChatGPT on their devices and networks. Educators were worried that students who turned to it wouldn't learn critical-thinking and problem-solving skills. They also were concerned that the tool's answers might not be accurate or safe. Many other school systems in the United States and around the world have imposed similar bans.

Keith Schwarz, who teaches computer science at Stanford, said he had "switched back to pencil-and-paper exams," so students couldn't use ChatGPT, according to the Stanford Daily.

Yet ChatGPT and its kin could also be a great service to learners everywhere. Like calculators for math or Google for facts, AI can make writing that often takes time and effort much faster. With these tools, anyone can generate well-formed sentences and paragraphs. How could this change the way we teach and learn?

Who said what?

When prompted, ChatGPT can craft answers that sound surprisingly like those from a student. We asked middle school and high school students from across the country, all participants in our Science News Learning education program, to answer some basic science questions in two sentences or less. The examples throughout the story compare how students responded with how ChatGPT responded when asked to answer the question at the same grade level.

What effect do greenhouse gases have on the Earth?

Agnes B. | Grade 11, Harbor City International School, Minn.

Greenhouse gases effectively trap heat from dissipating out of the atmosphere, increasing the amount of heat that remains near Earth in the troposphere.

ChatGPT

Greenhouse gases trap heat in the Earth's atmosphere, causing the planet to warm up and leading to climate change and its associated impacts like sea level rise, more frequent extreme weather events and shifts in ecosystems.

The good, bad and weird of ChatGPT

ChatGPT has wowed its users. "It's so much more realistic than I thought a robot could be," says Avani Rao, a sophomore in high school in California. She hasn't used the bot to do homework. But for fun, she's prompted it to say creative or silly things. She asked it to explain addition, for instance, in the voice of an evil villain.

Given how well it performs, there are plenty of ways that ChatGPT could level the playing field for students and others working in a second language or struggling with composing sentences. Since ChatGPT generates new, original material, its text is not technically plagiarism.

Students could use ChatGPT like a coach to help improve their writing and grammar, or even to explain subjects they find challenging. "It really will tutor you," says Vogelsinger, who had one student come to him excited that ChatGPT had clearly outlined a concept from science class.

Educators could use ChatGPT to help generate lesson plans, activities or assessments - perhaps even personalized to address the needs or goals of specific students.

Xiaoming Zhai, an expert in science education at the University of Georgia in Athens, tested ChatGPT to see if it could write an academic paper. He was impressed with how easy it was to summarize knowledge and generate good writing using the tool. "It's really amazing," he says.

All of this sounds wonderful, but really big problems exist. Most worrying, ChatGPT and other similar tools can often get things very wrong. They don't pull facts from databases. Rather, they are trained to generate new text that sounds natural. They remix language without understanding it, which can lead to glaring mistakes.

The news website CNET came under fire earlier this year for using AI to churn out dozens of articles, many of them packed with errors. In an early advertisement for the Bard chatbot, it made a factual error about the James Webb Space Telescope, incorrectly claiming that it had taken the very first picture of an exoplanet. And ChatGPT said in a conversation posted on Twitter that the fastest marine mammal was the peregrine falcon. A falcon, of course, is a bird and doesn't live in the ocean.

ChatGPT is "confidently wrong," says Casey Fiesler, an expert in the ethics of technology at the University of Colorado Boulder. "There are mistakes and bad information." She has made multiple TikTok videos about the pitfalls of ChatGPT.

Most of ChatGPT's training data come from before September 2021, and it does not provide sources for its information. If asked for sources, it makes them up, Fiesler revealed in one video. Zhai, who sees the tool as an assistant, discovered the exact same thing. When he asked ChatGPT for citations, it gave him sources that looked correct. But they didn't actually exist.

How ChatGPT works

ChatGPT's mistakes make sense if you know how it works. "It doesn't reason. It doesn't have ideas. It doesn't have thoughts," explains Emily M. Bender, a computational linguist at the University of Washington in Seattle.

ChatGPT was developed using at least two types of machine learning. The primary type is a large language model based on an artificial neural network. Loosely inspired by how neurons in the brain interact, this computing architecture finds statistical patterns in vast amounts of data.

A language model learns to predict what words will come next in a sentence or phrase by churning through vast amounts of text. It places words and phrases into a multidimensional map that represents their relationships to one another. Words that tend to come together, like peanut butter and jelly, end up closer together in this map.

The size of an artificial neural network is measured in parameters. These internal values get tweaked as the model learns. In 2020, OpenAI released GPT-3. At the time, it was the biggest language model ever, containing 175 billion parameters. It had trained on text from the internet as well as digitized books and academic journals. Training text also included transcripts of dialog, essays, exams and more, says Sasha Luccioni, a Montreal-based researcher at Hugging Face, a company that builds AI tools.

OpenAI improved upon GPT-3 to create GPT-3.5. In early 2022, the company released a fine-tuned version of GPT-3.5 called InstructGPT. This time, OpenAI added a new type of machine learning. Called reinforcement learning with human feedback, it puts people into the training process. These workers check the AI's output. Responses that people like get rewarded. Human feedback can also help reduce hurtful, biased or inappropriate responses. This fine-tuned language model powers freely available ChatGPT. As of March, paying users receive answers powered by GPT-4, a bigger language model.

During ChatGPT's development, OpenAI added extra safety rules to the model. It will refuse to answer certain sensitive prompts or provide harmful information. But this step raises another issue: Whose values are programmed into the bot, including what it is - or is not - allowed to talk about?

OpenAI is not offering exact details about how it developed and trained ChatGPT. The company has not released its code or training data. This disappoints Luccioni because it means the tool can't benefit from the perspectives of the larger AI community. "I'd like to know how it works so I can understand how to make it better," she says.

When asked to comment on this story, OpenAI provided a statement from an unnamed spokesperson. "We made ChatGPT available as a research preview to learn from real-world use, which we believe is a critical part of developing and deploying capable, safe AI systems," the statement said. "We are constantly incorporating feedback and lessons learned." Indeed, some experimenters have gotten the bot to say biased or inappropriate things despite the safety rules. OpenAI has been patching the tool as these problems come up.

ChatGPT is not a finished product. OpenAI needs data from the real world. The people who are using it are the guinea pigs. Notes Bender: "You are working for OpenAI for free."

ChatGPT's academic performance

How good is ChatGPT in an academic setting? Catherine Gao, a doctor and medical researcher at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, is part of one team of researchers that is putting the tool to the test.

Gao and her colleagues gathered 50 real abstracts from research papers in medical journals and then, after providing the titles of the papers and the journal names, asked ChatGPT to generate 50 fake abstracts. The team asked people familiar with reading and writing these types of research papers to identify which were which.

"I was surprised by how realistic and convincing the generated abstracts were," Gao says. The reviewers mistook roughly one-third of the AI-generated abstracts as human-generated.

In another study, Will Yeadon and colleagues tested whether AI tools could pass a college exam. Yeadon, a physics instructor at Durham University in England, picked an exam from a course that he teaches. The test asks students to write five short essays about physics and its history. Students have an average score of 71 percent, which he says is equivalent to an A in the United States.

Yeadon used the tool davinci-003, a close cousin of ChatGPT. It generated 10 sets of exam answers. Then Yeadon and four other teachers graded the answers using their typical standards. The AI also scored an average of 71 percent. Unlike the human students, though, it had no very low or very high marks. It consistently wrote well, but not excellently. For students who regularly get bad grades in writing, Yeadon says, it "will write a better essay than you."

These graders knew they were looking at AI work. In a follow-up study, Yeadon plans to use work from the AI and students and not tell the graders whose is whose.

Tools to check for cheating

When it's unclear whether ChatGPT wrote something or not, other AI tools may help. These tools typically train on AI-generated text and sometimes human-generated text as well. They can tell you how likely it is that text was composed by an AI. Many of the existing tools were trained on older language models, but developers are working quickly to put out new, improved tools.

A company called Originality.ai sells access to a tool that trained on GPT-3. Founder Jon Gillham says that in a test of 10,000 samples of texts composed by models based on GPT-3, the tool tagged 94 percent of them correctly as AI-generated. When ChatGPT came out, his team tested a smaller set of 20 samples. Each only 500 words in length, these had been created by ChatGPT and other models based on GPT-3 and GPT-3.5. Here, Gillham says, the tool "tagged all of them as AI-generated. And it was 99 percent confident, on average."

In late January 2023, OpenAI released its own free tool for spotting AI writing, cautioning that the tool was "not fully reliable." The company is working to add watermarks to its AI text, which would tag the output as machine-generated, but doesn't give details on how. Gillham describes one possible approach: Whenever it generates text, the AI ranks many different possible words for each position. If its developers told it to always choose the word ranked in third place rather than first place at specific points in its output, those words could act as a fingerprint, he says.

As AI writing tools improve, the tools to sniff them out will need to improve as well. Eventually, some sort of watermark might be the only way to sort out true authorship.

ChatGPT and the future of writing

There's no doubt we will soon have to adjust to a world in which computers can write for us. But educators have made these sorts of adjustments before. As high school student Rao points out, Google was once seen as a threat to education because it made it possible to look up facts instantly. Teachers adapted by coming up with teaching and testing materials that don't depend as heavily on memorization.

Now that AI can generate essays and stories, teachers may once again have to rethink how they teach and test. Rao says: "We might have to shift our point of view about what's cheating and what isn't."

Some teachers will prevent students from using AI by limiting access to technology. Right now, Vogelsinger says, teachers regularly ask students to write out answers or essays at home. "I think those assignments will have to change," he says. But he hopes that doesn't mean kids do less writing.

Teaching students to write without AI's help will remain essential, agrees Zhai. That's because "we really care about a student's thinking," he stresses. And writing is a great way to demonstrate thinking. Though ChatGPT can help a student organize their thoughts, it can't think for them, he says.

Kids still learn to do basic math even though they have calculators (which are often on the phones they never leave home without), Zhai acknowledges. Once students have learned basic math, they can lean on a calculator for help with more complex problems.

In the same way, once students have learned to compose their thoughts, they could turn to a tool like ChatGPT for assistance with crafting an essay or story. Vogelsinger doesn't expect writing classes to become editing classes, where students brush up AI content. He instead imagines students doing prewriting or brainstorming, then using AI to generate parts of a draft, and working back and forth to revise and refine from there.

Though he's overwhelmed about the prospect of having to adapt his teaching to another new technology, he says he is "having fun" figuring out how to navigate the new tech with his students.

Rao doesn't see AI ever replacing stories and other texts generated by humans. Why? "The reason those things exist is not only because we want to read it but because we want to write it," she says. People will always want to make their voices heard.

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How ChatGPT and similar AI will disrupt education

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The new chatbot ChatGPT and other generative AI encourage cheating and offer up incorrect info, but they could also be used for good.

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hatter about artificial intelligence mostly falls into three basic categories: anxious uncertainty (will it take our jobs?); existential dread (will it kill us all?); and simple pragmatism (can AI write my lesson plan?). In this hazy, liminal, pre-disruption moment, there is little consensus as to whether generative AI is a tool or a threat, and few rules for using it properly. For students, this uncertainty feels especially profound. Bans on AI and claims that using it constitutes cheating are now giving way to concerns that AI use is inevitable and probably should be taught in school. Now, as a new college admissions season kicks into gear, many prospective applicants are wondering: can AI write my personal essay? Should it?

Ever since the company OpenAI released ChatGPT to the public in November, students have been testing the limits of chatbots - generative AI tools powered by language-based algorithms - which can complete essay assignments within minutes. The results tend to be grammatically impeccable but intellectually bland, rife with cliche and misinformation. Yet teachers and school administrators still struggle to separate the more authentic wheat from the automated chaff. Some institutions are investing in AI detection tools, but these are proving spotty at best. In recent tests, popular AI text detectors wrongly flagged articles by non-native English speakers, and some suggested that AI wrote the US constitution. In July OpenAI quietly pulled AI Classifier, its experimental AI detection tool, citing "its low rate of accuracy".

Preventing students from using generative AI in their application essays seems like shoving a genie back in a bottle, but few colleges have offered guidance for how students can use AI ethically. This is partly because academic institutions are still reeling from the recent US supreme court ruling on affirmative action, which struck down a policy that had allowed colleges to consider an applicant's race in order to increase campus diversity and broaden access to educational opportunity. But it is also because people are generally confused about what generative AI can do and whom it serves. As with any technological innovation in education, the question with AI is not merely whether students will use it unscrupulously. It is also whether AI widens access to real help or simply reinforces the privileges of the lucky few.

These questions feel especially urgent now that many selective colleges are giving more weight to admissions essays, which offer a chance for students to set themselves apart from the similarly ambitious, high-scoring hordes. The supreme court's ruling further bolstered the value of these essays by allowing applicants to use them to discuss their race. As more colleges offer test-optional or test-free admissions, essays are growing more important.

In the absence of advice on AI from national bodies for college admissions officers and counselors, a handful of institutions have entered the void. Last month the University of Michigan Law School announced a ban on using AI tools in its application, while Arizona State University Law School said it would allow students to use AI as long as they disclose it. Georgia Tech is rare in offering AI guidance to undergraduate applicants, stating explicitly that tools like ChatGPT can be used "to brainstorm, edit, and refine your ideas", but "your ultimate submission should be your own".

According to Rick Clark, Georgia Tech's assistant vice-provost and executive director of undergraduate admission, AI has the potential to "democratize" the admissions process by allowing the kind of back-and-forth drafting process that some students get from attentive parents, expensive tutors or college counselors at small, elite schools. "Here in the state of Georgia the average counselor-to-student ratio is 300 to one, so a lot of people aren't getting much assistance," he told me. "This is a real opportunity for students."

Likening AI bans to early concerns that calculators would somehow ruin math, Clark said he hopes Georgia Tech's approach will "dispel some misplaced paranoia" about generative AI and point a way forward. "What we're trying to do is say, here's how you appropriately use these tools, which offer a great way for students to get started, for getting them past the blank page." He clarified that simply copying and pasting AI-generated text serves no one because the results tend to be flat. Yet with enough tweaks and revisions, he said, collaborating with AI can be "one of the few resources some of these students have, and in that regard it's absolutely positive".

We should tell students that people with privileged access to college hire fancy tutors to gain every advantage possible, so here are tools to help you advocate for yourselves

Jeremy Douglas of UC Santa Barbara

Although plenty of students and educators remain squeamish about allowing AI into the drafting process, it seems reasonable to hope that these tools could help improve the essays of those who can't afford outside assistance. Most AI tools are relatively cheap or free, so nearly anyone with a device and an internet connection can use them. Chatbots can suggest topics, offer outlines and rephrase statements. They can also help organize thoughts into paragraphs, which is something most teenagers struggle to do on their own.

"I think some people think the personal application essay shouldn't be gamed in this way, but the system was already a game," Jeremy Douglas, an assistant professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, said. "We shouldn't be telling students, 'You're too smart and ethical for that so don't use it.' Instead we should tell them that people with privileged access to college hire fancy tutors to gain every advantage possible, so here are tools to help you advocate for yourselves."

In my conversations with various professors, admissions officers and college prep tutors, most agreed that tools like ChatGPT are capable of writing good admissions essays, not great ones, as the results lack the kind of color and specificity that can make these pieces shine. Some apps aim to parrot a user's distinctive style, but students still need to rework what AI generates to get these essays right. This is where the question of whether AI will truly help underserved students becomes more interesting. In theory, AI-generated language tools should widen access to essay guidance, grammar checks and feedback. In practice, the students who might be best served by these tools are often not learning how to use them effectively.

The country's largest school districts, New York City public schools and the Los Angeles unified school district, initially banned the use of generative AI on school networks and devices, which ensured that only students who had access to devices and the internet at home could take advantage of these tools. Both districts have since announced they are rethinking these bans, but this is not quite the same as helping students understand how best to use ChatGPT. "When students are not given this guidance, there's a higher risk of them resorting to plagiarism and misusing the tool," Zachary Cohen, an education consultant and middle school director at the Francis Parker School of Louisville, Kentucky, said. While his school joins some others in the private sector in teaching students how to harness AI to brainstorm ideas, iterate essays and also how to sniff out inaccurate dreck, few public schools have a technology officer on hand to navigate these new and choppy waters. "In this way, we're setting up marginalized students to fail and wealthier students to succeed."

Writing is hard. Even trained professionals struggle to translate thoughts and feelings into words on a page. Personal essays are especially hard, particularly when there is so much riding on finding that perfect balance between humility and bravado, vulnerability and restraint. Recent studies confirming the very real lifetime value of a degree from a fancy college merely validate concerns about getting these essays right. "I will sit with students and ask questions they don't know to ask themselves, about who they are and why something happened and then what happened next," said Irena Smith, a former Stanford admissions officer who now works as a college admissions consultant in Palo Alto. "Not everyone can afford someone who does that." When some students get their personal statements sculpted by handsomely paid English PhDs, it seems unfair to accuse those who use AI as simply "outsourcing" the hard work.

Smith admits to some ambivalence about the service she provides, but doesn't yet view tools like ChatGPT as serious rivals. Although she suspects the benefits of AI will redound to those who have been taught "what to ask and how to ask it", she said she hopes this new technology will help all students. "People like me are symptoms of a really broken system," she said. "So if ChatGPT does write me out of a job, or if colleges change their admissions practices because it becomes impossible to distinguish between a ChatGPT essay and a real student essay, then so much the better."

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'A real opportunity': how ChatGPT could help college applicants

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With the end of affirmative action, generative AI could 'democratize' admissions by giving students who don't have tutors or counselors a leg up

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Cover Image generated by Dall-E in response to the prompt "Create a captivating cover image for an article titled 'The Rise of Artificial Intelligence: Exploring the Future of Technology and Society.'" which was generated by GPT-4 on 5/24/23 in response to the prompt "Generate a prompt for Dall-E for a cover image for an article on ChatGPT."
The M-A Chronicle surveyed 111 students across all four grade levels about their ChatGPT usage. 26% said that they had used ChatGPT to complete assignments for their classes, 66% of whom said they had done so more than once.

Since the release of ChatGPT in November of 2022, schools across the country have struggled to adapt, some encouraging students to use the software to help generate ideas for their writing and others trying to figure out how to prevent students from using it. At some points last year, M-A blocked ChatGPT for all students using the school's WiFi, but this doesn't prevent students from using hotspots or from using ChatGPT at home. Additionally, students might not always be caught when they use AI to complete their homework. In an M-A Chronicle survey given last fall, teachers were only able to correctly identify 62% of essays as either student-written or ChatGPT-written.

Most students, though, reported only using ChatGPT to help give them ideas for what to write. Only three students out of 111 said they had submitted an altered version of an AI-generated response and none of the students surveyed said they had submitted a word-for-word AI response.

The number of students using ChatGPT was less than that of students who had copied assignments from their peers. 18 students said they'd asked their friends for a copy of their homework, but didn't repeat exactly what they said and one student said they'd submitted someone else's assignment as their own.

Students' perceptions of ChatGPT usage among their peers didn't match their self-reporting of whether or not they were using AI on their assignments. 39% of students said they thought either almost all of their peers, most of their peers, or some of their peers were using ChatGPT, 27% said they thought a few of their peers were using ChatGPT, and 5% thought none of their peers were using ChatGPT.

Some students mentioned feeling like, even if they weren't using ChatGPT, they were at a disadvantage because their peers were. One student said, "The problem is that a lot of the AI detection software is really faulty, so students who actually did their homework may be accused of having used AI on it, and there's no set way to disprove the accusations. When so many students use AI, it casts suspicion on everyone."

22% of students said they thought using ChatGPT was extremely wrong, 41% said they thought it was somewhat wrong, and 23% said they thought it was neither wrong nor right.

Many students thought using ChatGPT was only wrong if people submitted a word for word or slightly altered ChatGPT response, but not if they only used it to generate ideas. One student said, "I feel like it's only wrong if you copy and paste, or if you understand the topic but are too lazy to write it. If you use it to give you ideas, like an outline or something, I feel like it's okay. Or if you just don't understand the topic and have tried other ways to try to understand, but you still don't. It's a useful tool, but it shouldn't be abused."

Another said, "AI is a tool a student can use like Google. Like a search engine, it can assist in developing ideas; however it can also be used to simply copy someone's (in this case the AI's) ideas. If used properly it can probably be very helpful and assist in education. However, defining what 'proper use' is, is very difficult."

A few students (7%) said they thought using ChatGPT was either somewhat right or extremely right. One student said, "It's not AI that will take over, it's the ones who use AI. To compete with others today and in the future, AI is one of the greatest tools one will use."

Another said, "I think instead of banning AI, we should take advantage of it and learn how to use it instead of avoiding it. In the near future, AI is going to be used frequently all over the world, making jobs easier."

Even if students are only using ChatGPT to generate ideas, by using an algorithm designed to calculate the most likely answer to a question, they may still be missing out on the chance to develop their own unique ideas, which is a crucial aspect of the learning process. One student said, "I think using AI on assignments is wrong because not only are you betraying the trust of your teachers, you aren't learning, so you won't be as knowledgeable as you need to be."

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Over a Quarter of Students Report Using ChatGPT to Complete Assignments - M-A Chronicle

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ChatGPT usage among students has skyrocketed. Of the 111 students interviewed, 26% used ChatGPT on an assignment.