Educators are trying to strike a balance between embracing new, potentially biased AI tools and preserving the integrity of learning.
This new school year, Jordan Clayton-Taylor, a Chicago high school English teacher, said she’s going old-school. When it comes time to write an essay, her students will have to close the Chromebooks and use pen and paper instead.
It’s a preemptive strike of sorts: Clayton-Taylor is instituting the policy after realizing last year that students were copying and pasting prompts into ChatGPT, then turning in the result as though it were their own work. And just as teachers insisted that cheating hurts the cheater, Clayton-Taylor worries that artificial intelligence chatbots are eroding students’ ability to think for themselves.
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“It definitely does impact students’ critical thinking skills,” Clayton-Taylor says. “They’re not able to think on their own. The purpose of English is for you to be able to formulate your own idea.”
Since emerging as a breakthrough educational technology in recent years, AI has been hailed as a savior for Black students, a low-cost way to personalize learning and tutoring, tackle learning loss, and level the playing field between underfunded Black schools and affluent white ones. But besides its propensity for built-in bias, teachers and education experts worry that, when it comes to student learning, original thinking, and knowledge retention, AI can be more of a hindrance than a help.
As more and more young teens are starting ChatGPT to help with their schoolwork, some educators are grappling with how to teach in a learning environment where artificial intelligence tools like chatbots are so accessible, spewing out answers and complete essays within seconds.
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