New Artificial Intelligence technology draws support and critics in schools

OpenAI's new chatbot is raising fears of cheating on homework, but some educators see it as a potential educational tool.

Chat GPT is a text generation system that has the potential to write essays, act as a virtual assistant, and even provide customer support.

Artificial intelligence allows you to generate conversational text for some questions. The system goes as far as creating code.

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, took to Twitter to announce that ChatGPT clocked a million users merely a few days following its launch.

Users have been operating the software since it launched in November 2022. The system is currently at capacity and not accepting new users.

Some public schools on the East Coast have already banned the system from their schools' devices and networks.

In a statement from the Coachella Valley Unified School District, it says:

Bans on the use of language models like ChatGPT in academic settings are practically impossible due to the difficulty of detecting when text is composed by the model. However, let's be clear that plagiarism is NOT tolerated and any attempts to use language models for academic dishonesty will be met with appropriate consequences. We’ve always been proactive in making this known. For example, CVUSD board policy 5131.9 is against any plagiarism regardless of the platform, source, or technology. Additionally, a statement against plagiarism is included in all student handbooks every school year to serve as one of the many reminders shared throughout the year.

Instead of focusing on bans, it may be more effective to rethink how students are taught and evaluated in order to promote original thinking and discourage cheating.

A Professor at College Of The Desert showed News Channel 3 how the platform works. "We are working on informing the public faculty about Chat GPT and its use or potential use in the classroom," says Professor Felix Marhuenda-Donate, a Computer Information systems professor. "We have training sessions at the beginning of every semester to talk with the faculty about different developments in education, and chat GPT is definitely going to be one of those topics."

Professor Marhuenda-Donate was able to get an account on Chat GPT before it closed to new members.