Don't ban ChatGPT in schools. Teach with it

Recently, I gave a talk to a group of K-12 teachers and public school administrators in New York. The topic was artificial intelligence, and how schools would need to adapt to prepare students for a future filled with all kinds of capable AI tools.

But it turned out that my audience cared about only one AI tool: ChatGPT, the buzzy chatbot developed by Open AI that is capable of writing cogent essays, solving science and math problems and producing working computer code.

ChatGPT is new — it was released in late November — but it has already sent many educators into a panic. Students are using it to write their assignments, passing off AI-generated essays and problem sets as their own. Teachers and school administrators have been scrambling to catch students using the tool to cheat, and they are fretting about the havoc ChatGPT could wreak on their lesson plans. (Some publications have declared, perhaps a bit prematurely, that ChatGPT has killed homework altogether.)

Cheating is the immediate, practical fear, along with the bot’s propensity to spit out wrong or misleading answers. But there are existential worries, too. One high school teacher told me that he used ChatGPT to evaluate a few of his students’ papers, and that the app had provided more detailed and useful feedback on them than he would have, in a tiny fraction of the time.

“Am I even necessary now?” he asked me, only half-joking.

Some schools have responded to ChatGPT by cracking down. New York City public schools, for example, recently blocked ChatGPT access on school computers and networks, citing “concerns about negative impacts on student learning, and concerns regarding the safety and accuracy of content.” Schools in other cities have also restricted access.

It’s easy to understand why educators feel threatened. ChatGPT is a freakishly capable tool that landed in their midst with no warning, and it performs reasonably well across a wide variety of tasks and academic subjects. There are legitimate questions about the ethics of AI-generated writing, and concerns about whether the answers ChatGPT gives are accurate. (Often, they’re not.) And I’m sympathetic to teachers who feel that they have enough to worry about, without adding AI-generated homework to the mix.

But after talking with dozens of educators over the past few weeks, I’ve come around to the view that banning ChatGPT from the classroom is the wrong move.

Instead, I believe schools should thoughtfully embrace ChatGPT as a teaching aid — one that could unlock student creativity, offer personalised tutoring, and better prepare students to work alongside AI systems as adults. Here’s why.

It won’t work

The first reason not to ban ChatGPT in schools is that, to be blunt, it’s not going to work.

Sure, a school can block the ChatGPT website on school networks and school-owned devices. But students have phones, laptops and any number of other ways of accessing it outside of class. (Just for kicks, I asked ChatGPT how a student who was intent on using the app might evade a schoolwide ban. It came up with five answers, all totally plausible, including using a VPN to disguise the student’s web traffic.)

Some teachers have high hopes for tools such as GPTZero, a programme built by a Princeton University student that claims to be able to detect AI-generated writing. But these tools aren’t reliably accurate, and it’s relatively easy to fool them by changing a few words, or using a different AI programme to paraphrase certain passages.

AI chatbots could be programmed to watermark their outputs in some way, so teachers would have an easier time spotting AI-generated text. But this, too, is a flimsy defence. Right now, ChatGPT is the only free, easy-to-use chatbot of its calibre. But there will be others, and students will soon be able to take their pick, probably including apps with no AI fingerprints.

Even if it were technically possible to block ChatGPT, do teachers want to spend their nights and weekends keeping up with the latest AI detection software? Several educators I spoke with said that while they found the idea of ChatGPT-assisted cheating annoying, policing it sounded even worse.

“I don’t want to be in an adversarial relationship with my students,” said Gina Parnaby, chair of the English department at the Marist School, an independent school for grades 7 through 12 outside Atlanta. “If our mindset approaching this is that we have to build a better mousetrap to catch kids cheating, I just think that’s the wrong approach, because the kids are going to figure something out.”

Instead of starting an endless game of whack-a-mole against an ever-expanding army of AI chatbots, here’s a suggestion: For the rest of the academic year, schools should treat ChatGPT the way they treat calculators — allowing it for some assignments, but not others, and assuming that unless students are being supervised in person with their devices stashed away, they’re probably using one.

Then, over the summer, teachers can modify their lesson plans — replacing take-home exams with in-class tests or group discussions, for example — to try to keep cheaters at bay.

ChatGPT can be a teacher’s best friend

The second reason not to ban ChatGPT from the classroom is that, with the right approach, it can be an effective teaching tool.

Cherie Shields, a high school English teacher in Oregon, told me that she had recently assigned students in one of her classes to use ChatGPT to create outlines for their essays comparing and contrasting two 19th-century short stories that touch on themes of gender and mental health: The Story of an Hour, by Kate Chopin, and The Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Once the outlines were generated, her students put their laptops away and wrote their essays longhand.

The process, she said, had not only deepened students’ understanding of the stories. It had also taught them about interacting with AI models, and how to coax a helpful response out of one.

“They have to understand, ‘I need this to produce an outline about X, Y and Z,’ and they have to think very carefully about it,” Shields said. “And if they don’t get the result that they want, they can always revise it.”