<
https://www.techdirt.com/2023/12/21/chatgpt-cheating-fears-seem-overstated/>
"There have been all sorts of overblown fears and moral panics raised by the
availability of new generative AI tools. And one that I keep hearing about,
which many people have accepted as obviously true, is that it will damage
school education, as kids will just use ChatGPT to do their work.
This has always been a bit overblown for a variety of reasons, including that
by its very nature, ChatGPT output tends to be “average” at best, and for
anything that involves any level of deeper thinking, it tends to be pretty
obvious, pretty quickly, that the tool just isn’t that good.
Now, the
NY Times has highlighted how some recent Stanford research has
called into question the entire premise. It’s based on an ongoing series of
anonymous surveys to students regarding a variety of behavior that might impact
their education that is done by a school reform nonprofit named Challenge
Success. As the co-founder of that group, Denise Pope, notes, the survey seeks
to find out honest answers on things like “the amount of sleep they get,
homework pressure, extracurricular activities, family expectations, things like
that — and also several questions about different forms of cheating.”
She notes that the latest surveys don’t suggest any mass increase in cheating,
and that the numbers of students who say they’ve cheated have mostly held
steady. You could argue that that’s not really the point, as the nature of the
cheating could be very different, even if the number of kids doing it remains
the same, but there were some other interesting findings:
But I think it’s important to point out that, in Challenge Success’ most
recent survey, students were also asked if and how they felt an AI chatbot
like ChatGPT should be allowed for school-related tasks. Many said they
thought it should be acceptable for “starter” purposes, like explaining a
new concept or generating ideas for a paper. But the vast majority said that
using a chatbot to write an entire paper should never be allowed. So this
idea that students who’ve never cheated before are going to suddenly run
amok and have AI write all of their papers appears unfounded.
And, this is actually encouraging, because that kind of use of ChatGPT… is
actually good? It’s the kind of way that the tool should also be used in the
real world. These tools can be useful starting points or brainstorming tools."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
