OpenAI has shared some important news that teachers might find interesting. They say that it’s really hard for teachers to figure out if students are using a smart computer program called ChatGPT to do their schoolwork. This is because the special tools that are supposed to tell if something was written by a human or a computer often get it wrong.
ChatGPT can be helpful for students, but it can also cause some problems. OpenAI, the company that made ChatGPT, recently said that teachers won’t be able to know if students used ChatGPT for their assignments. This has made things tricky for teachers all around the world. Students have been using ChatGPT to get their work done because the computer program is so good at sounding like a human when it writes.
OpenAI mentioned that some tools were made to find out if something was written by a computer, but none of them are very good at telling the difference between computer and human writing. Even ChatGPT itself doesn’t know if something was written by a computer or a person. Sometimes, when you ask ChatGPT if it wrote something, it might randomly say “yes” or “no.” These answers don’t really mean anything; they’re just guesses.
OpenAI also pointed out that these tools sometimes make mistakes by saying that something written by a person was actually written by a computer. For example, when they tried to teach a tool to recognize computer writing, it thought stuff written by real people, like Shakespeare’s writings and the Declaration of Independence, were actually written by a computer. This shows that these tools still have a lot of problems.
There’s another issue to think about too. Some students, like those who are learning English as a second language or those who write in a short and clear way, might get wrongly labeled as using a computer because of these tools. This can be really unfair to these students.
Even if these tools got better (which they haven’t yet), students can still change their writing a little bit to trick the tools. This means that students can keep using ChatGPT without getting caught, and that’s a big challenge for teachers and schools who want to make sure that students do their own work.
So, right now, it’s really tough for these tools to tell if something was written by a computer or a person, especially in schoolwork. More research and development are needed to fix these problems and make sure that these tools work better.
However, OpenAI also said that teachers can use ChatGPT in a different way. They can make classroom lessons more exciting and fun with it. They can also see how students use ChatGPT and learn about how students think and solve problems. Students can show what they know by using ChatGPT, and teachers can see if students ask good questions and understand the information they find. So, even though it’s hard to tell if a student used a computer, teachers can still use ChatGPT to help them teach and learn in new ways.