Ever since AI Chatbots have caught mainstream attention the American education system has been in a panic to try and stop rampant unethical cheating in high schools and colleges across the country. The allure feels so simple, “Why spend so much time doing the work when you could just ask AI to do it for you? You get the same result in the end.” Students everywhere started cheating with AI Chatbots; it became a war between students and teachers everywhere. That war still hasn’t ended as schools try to police unethical AI usage with threats of failure and expulsion, but students use it anyway.
Attempts to police such AI usage mainly involve fear, since if the school does catch a student, they can easily punish them severely, but it’s a matter of getting caught. Teachers have AI writing checkers that read writing patterns and grammar to see if an AI wrote some text or if it’s human typed. It’s easy to use AI to solve math problems on homework because nobody’s watching you, but math professors require one’s work on how they got there. Multiple choice questions could be googled or found out instantly with an AI chatbot, during the start of the AI crisis teachers used to force students to put on cameras and add special programs that prevented students from tabbing out of an online test, however that was deemed too much and quickly removed.
Nowadays schools have had a lot of time to adjust to the usage of AI chatbots and how to work around it. Some teachers have even started incorporating it into their curriculum or allowing usage for research purposes.
Many people bring up the debate of how ethical AI use in schools is, usually with a very black and white answer, but there’s a nuance to it. There’s a ton of different scenarios and factors that determine this answer. There are cut and dry scenarios of students using AI to write their papers without doing a thing besides prompting the AI, obviously unethical. On the other hand, there’s a copywriting class that incorporates the use of AI to write copy based on a provided template to get to know the keys AI uses, no rules broken, AI is completely ethical in this scenario.
There are tons of in between scenarios too. What if a student used AI to look up relevant quotes with linked sources cited perfectly so they could get pasted into a paper like it was hand typed. That’s unfair to students who found sources without AI as not everyone knows about the process but as long as those quotes and sources have non-ai writing around them it’s no different looking than someone who did it all legitimately and there’s no AI original writing involved, only human written quotes put onto a paper with sources.
In a situation like that there’s more nuance to whether it’s ethical or not. In my opinion as long as AI isn’t replacing your original work, only speeding up research which requires human verification to get properly applied to work it’s fine.
There’s also the aspect of what the student absorbs from the class, there’s always the possibility students retain little to nothing from a class and struggle afterwords in classes where they’re expected to retain knowledge from previous classes they may have used AI in to get straight to the answers.
I think there should be some kind of AI Chatbot that fits within school guidelines like how Zoom fits within guidelines for professional video communication.
