For decades, students have been procrastinating their work and manifesting good grades. Now, due to the help of ChatGPT, this method has become much easier. ChatGPT is a form of AI that, given a prompt, will be able to write anything, from business taglines to a 1000-word essay. Released on Nov. 30, 2022, ChatGPT has brought countless effects to the educational community.  

One commonly asked question is: can a teacher tell if a student is using ChatGPT? 

Teachers can use ChatGPT to type in prompts related to their essays and see what points the AI makes and compare it with students’ essays to figure out if students are cheating. However, ChatGPT is smart because if you type in one prompt two times in a row it will write you two different entries for that prompt. 

“The company is currently developing ways to combat that and to identify essays that ChatGPT has written,” Jason Albaugh, a Latin teacher at the high school, said.

Cheating isn’t the only thing ChatGPT is being used for. Teachers are beginning to look at how ChatGPT can benefit them. ChatGPT has been used to lighten teachers’ workloads and is in general a cool tool to experiment with. 

“I have had a lot of fun with it. I have played around with it. I have personally asked it to see if it could produce a unit plan for the things that I have been looking at and it has come up with some really good ideas,” Albaugh said.

While it may be a fun tool to play around with, that doesn’t mean it should be our only resource. 

 “It’s not always gonna be able to be there to do all your work as you continue on in life,” Christine Mapes, a social studies teacher at the high school, said.

ChatGPT has the potential to be a valuable tool in the classroom. Its ability to understand natural language and generate human-like responses can assist teachers in providing personalized instruction and feedback to students. 

Additionally, ChatGPT can help to alleviate the workload of educators by automating administrative tasks such as grading and providing information. However, there are also several potential drawbacks to using ChatGPT in schools. Its reliance on pre-existing data could lead to bias and inaccuracies in responses. 

The use of ChatGPT may discourage critical thinking and creativity, as students may become too reliant on technology for answers.

 In fact, the last six sentences were typed by the ChatGPT AI. Fooled you, didn’t it?