New York Teachers Dissecting Artificial Intelligence Cheating

Cheating options for students have reached a new level of sophistication. With artificial intelligence apps, like ChatGPT, students have well over a billion possible "human sounding responses" to questions at their fingertips. So, where do these A.I. apps leave our education system?

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Colleges, universities and school districts across the country have been scrambling to create plans to ban the apps. However, in New York, teachers are in attack mode using the apps to instruct students about the dangers of relying on artificial intelligence. In a cool article on nytimes.com, Natasha Singer talked to a Bronx high school computer science teacher that is using the technology to teach her students there are shortfalls with artificial intelligence.

Singer reported that New York City Public Schools, with over 900,000 students is the nation's largest district, is training a group of computer science teachers to help their students identify artificial intelligence biases and risks. One such lesson being used in several states asks students to: consider if it is ethical, that powerful artificial intelligence systems can be used to produce fake media content. These A.I. programs create realistic videos in which popular personalities or politicians may appear to be speaking words they never actually said. These are challenges that our next generations will be dealing with and New York educators are at the forefront of facing those obstacles head on.

Kate Moore is education researcher at M.I.T.. Moore helped create the A.I. lessons for schools to use. She told nytimes.com, "It’s important for students to know about how A.I. works because their data is being scraped, their user activity is being used to train these tools. Decisions are being made about young people using A.I., whether they know it or not.”

Are these apps popular? Well, according to Reuters, a San Francisco company, OpenAI, developed ChatGPT. The app has actually "at times has turned away users because of explosive growth, with UBS analysts reporting it had 57 million unique visitors in December outpacing potentially TikTok in adoption." On Tuesday, Google announced their own version of ChatGPT. A.I. will be an issue or a solution for educators for years to come. It just depends on the next steps.