One way or another: One question, two opposing viewpoints

Artificial intelligence cheats students into success

Opinion By Kevin Khachatryan, Staff Writer

More than a quarter of K-12 teachers have caught their students cheating using ChatGPT, according to a nationwide survey. This artificial intelligence website can generate a five-paragraph essay good enough to create an A-level paper.

Students can now rely on a machine to generate answers for their homework, raising serious concerns for the future of cheating on school work. Many people have been concerned with the rise of AI over the past few years because of its ability to do the work of humans.

According to Grade Crest, a 10-page paper or a 3,000 word essay takes 5-10 hours on average, but this website can answer any prompt given in less than 10-20 seconds.

“From a photography standpoint, you can create fake photos,” said photography 010 professor Kelly Battle. “I disagree with this, because it’s taking away jobs from real artists and photographers. This won’t help you understand how to set and control a camera.”

ChatGPT does not require that students truly understand the prompt or questions because the AI lacks an educational component. It simply generates words without any explanation. This means that its responses are likely shallow and lacking in depth and insight.

Students’ reliance on bots to generate answers for them could lead to a loss of genuine human connection. It’s better to reach out and connect with others through conversation because it helps one develop better communication skills while facilitating a deeper understanding of the coursework. Outsourcing that to a machine could have a detrimental side effect on our society.

This bot machine is frightening for people outside of academic settings as well. Many newsrooms have begun to speculate that the speed-writing, new-fangled AI generator might start replacing journalists.

While ChatGPT has the potential to put people out of work, it is not something new because the answers that the bot generates can be found on Wikipedia and other websites that provide the same answers.

The AI makes it impossible for teachers to assign online exams for students to do at home because cheating may cause students to excel on their assessments.

This is a bigger problem for students that take courses such as math, English or other subjects that have the ability for a bot to answer questions.

“From an academic viewpoint, I think it would be important for professors to get training on this kind of software to understand what students are using it for,” said Battle. “What are we missing from the classroom to evolve our teaching for a modern world?”

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ChatGPT usage bolts through schools and workplaces

Opinion by Andres Sanchez, Staff Writer

OpenAI software ChatGPT is facing scrutiny for its plagiarism capabilities instead of praise for how it will alleviate the workload of future students and workers.

San Francisco based company, OpenAI launched ChatGPT last November. The program is an artificial intelligence algorithm that interacts with its users in conversation, answers questions, writes prompts, solves problems and even rejects inappropriate requests. Although ChatGPT has received negative feedback from scholars, and automation of jobs has always been looked down upon, people have adjusted to automation before.

ChatGPT is being scrutinized by schools nationwide, prompting bans and companies like Turn It In to establish their own algorithm detection system to sniff out foul play. Students should strive to utilize ChatGPT in assisting them to gather information or construct outlines. Plagiarism is a problem, but there are many programs that can detect unedited outputs like AI Text Classifier, Originality.ai and GPTZero.

Valley College’s Office of Academic Affairs and Writing Office should consider having an open discourse among students and staff to acknowledge and educate students on how this program is used, along with teaching ways to prevent plagiarism. A Boston University article written by Joel Brown described how professor Wesley Wildman engaged his students into creating blueprints, rules and uses of the program. The students credited the program as a source when it was used. Banning ChatGPT will not work because students will always find a creative way to cheat, like using multiple chatbots or editing enough of the AI’s outputs.

“What the policy couldn’t do is simply ban ChatGPT and products like it, even if that were feasible,” said Wildman. “From the student point of view, this is their future. They need to figure out how to master these tools and integrate it into our toolkit.”

Students and professors adapting to ChatGPT are using it as the foundation for projects or assignments, the skeleton of their work in which students will connect muscles, organs, nerves using their own ideas. Using AI to create specific study plans for students or class will create an easier transition in teaching. Customizing teaching plans that involve students who are visual learners, cooperative, differentiated, or have special needs will maximize how a teacher can nurture thriving learning environments. In a CE Noticias Financieras article, teachers were interviewed on how they apply ChatGPT into students’ curriculum to practice their critical thinking skills.

“Even ChatGPT's flaws — such as the fact that its answers to factual questions are often incorrect - can become material for critical thinking exercises,” states the study. “Several teachers told me that they had asked students to try to get ChatGPT wrong or to evaluate their answers in the same way a teacher would evaluate a student's answers.”

AI will only become more integrated into society as technology advances in the future, recognizing and utilizing this will prevent us from becoming obsolete learners and workers.

ChatGPT is a revolutionary technology like the internet, cars and medicine — all which require regulation and laws which hold the companies like OpenAI liable and the student governments to create policies around it.