The rise of AI technology has brought forth new possibilities and challenges, especially in the realm of education. Chat GPT, a conversational AI model developed by OpenAI, has been causing controversy in the education sector by offering students a way to cheat on their homework. This AI model is capable of answering questions, solving math problems, and even writing essays with remarkable accuracy.
While some school districts, like New York City, have taken a strict approach by banning the use of AI for both students and teachers, others are finding creative solutions to combat AI-assisted cheating. Edward Tien, a computer science student at Princeton University, has developed an app called GPT 0 which detects if a piece of writing has been generated by AI, creating an AI arms race in the education system.
Ultimately, the issue of AI in education highlights the need to rethink traditional teaching methods and assessment strategies. Rather than focusing on rote memorization and essay writing, schools should prioritize critical thinking and problem-solving skills. As AI continues to evolve, the education system must adapt to ensure students are equipped for the future.
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Video Transcript
So AI has been in the news a lot for the past few months first we had stable diffusion taking first place from artist and art contests and now it’s pretty much a household application like or some other kind of drawing software especially for the people that are lucky
Enough to have current gen gpus and actually run stable diffusion fairly quickly but there’s one AI in particular that has been causing a lot of controversy in the education sector and that is chat GPT so this is another model that is produced by openai the same company that made Dolly but instead
Of producing images this model produces text this model is supposed to interact in a conversational way so you can sort of think of it like a chat bot and it’s really really smart you can ask it for advice on things and it’ll actually give you reasonable responses you can ask it
Questions and it will typically give you a correct answer and this is where things get tough for the world of Academia you can ask chat GPT to answer the questions on your homework and there’s a very good chance that it is actually going to give you the correct answers
You could even ask it to do math homework like you could tell it to show its work and just copy all of that down and it would be pretty difficult for your teacher to tell that you did your homework with AI and it’s important to note that these AI models they’re not
Just looking up like in the case of an essay they’re not just looking up an essay on the internet and then spitting that out in text form at you these are generative AI models they generate new and unique outputs so you could use something like Chad GPT to write your
Essay and possibly even have it list sources for you in your bibliography you can turn that in and it’s going to pass the plagiarism Checker at least the old school ones that they have for checking to see if you just copied someone’s s say or if you copied someone’s essay and
You just tried to change a few words here and there and then you get an A because a lot of professors and teachers have been shown what chat GPT can do they’ve literally seen the types of things that I can output and they’ve said that they would give full marks to
Its work so a lot of the homework that teachers are handing out which would probably take students hours to complete could just be done by an AI that is free to use in a matter of seconds so naturally we can’t have the kids making a mockery of their homework we can’t
Have them just playing fortnite while heckin robot writes their essay about Columbus for them so different people in different school districts are coming up with different ways to try to stop this new AI assisted form of cheating New York City unsurprisingly took the very cringe big government approach and
They just banned it for both students and teachers we don’t like the robots actually this isn’t even a robot it’s software so we don’t like the math we are not allowed to interact with that kind of math or those kinds of algorithms anymore at least not while you’re at school so yeah it’s
Unaccessible on New York City’s School networks now although I wonder just how secure and like just how inaccessible it really is on those networks because I remember when I was in school and granted I did most of my schooling in a small town and it was a long time ago
But the security at my school was hilariously bad looking back at it with all of the things that I know now and even some of the things that I did then like it was possible to bypass the firewall with proxies very easily and not even special like super obscure proxies ones
Like hide my ass that everyone knows about or everyone at least knew about back then I don’t know if there’s still a thing would work uh or you could just use any working IP from a free proxy list like Google free proxy list and just find I don’t know some Saucy
Russian IP connect to it and then within seconds you’re able to play Happy Wheels uh also the command prompt wasn’t locked down on the school so yeah every Skitty in that high school was able to get up to all kinds of tomfoolery but anyway I guess that schools in big cities they
Have better security I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt especially if they’re going to give students Chromebooks because then the administrators they would have very fine grain control over what people can do down to the device level but that’s only on the Chromebook and only when it’s on
The school’s Wi-Fi there’s nothing really stopping kids from using their smartphones and LTE data to access chat GPT and use that to cheat when they’re in class or especially because what it seems like is that the issue that people are having is kids are using this to cheat on their homework
I really don’t see how you’re going to stop them when they’re at home they’re using presumably their own devices at home on their own Wi-Fi so I wonder how effective this band that New York City is doing is really going to be one thing that I know for sure is that since it’s
A complete blanket ban on the New York networks the teachers aren’t going to be able to use it as a teaching tool and that’s what AI really is or at least that’s how I wish more people would look at it it’s just a tool one that’s going
To be useful in all areas of life just like the personal computer is and smartphones are and it’s going to help reduce the amount of trivial labor that we have to do but some people are just so adverse to this concept yet the tech keeps on getting better now there’s
Another approach that’s being used to stop the use of AI in schools or at least stop using AI to cheat on work in school and that approach is to fight AI with AI now this is the do-it-yourself based approach that I like to see so Edward Tien hopefully I’m pronouncing
That right is the person who developed this he’s a computer science student at Princeton University and he made this app called GPT 0 which uses similar technology to chat GPT to identify if something is written by AI so we already have an AI arms race taking place
Between people who don’t want to write essays or at least people who yeah I guess people who don’t want to write essays people who don’t want to do all of their schoolwork themselves or at least people who want to use AI for it and people who are trying to stop this
Plagiarizing or stop this cheating but honestly I think that the essay generating Bots are going to win this battle in the long run since the number of ways that you can write an essay and just the com combinations of words that you can put together that would actually
Make sense seems rather limited plus chat GPT it wasn’t even really designed specifically to write essays you know again it’s supposed to be more of a chatting bot it’s just able to do it as kind of a byproduct because the data that I was trained on is so large but
You can bet if someone did try to build specifically an essay writing bot with the same data set as chat GPT and they also incorporated gpt0 into the training basically they could use that to teach it how to evade GPT Zero’s detection techniques and then we could end up with a
Completely undetectable essay generator so I think that the real long-term solution to this instead of kids becoming professionals at using AI to cheat and teachers becoming AI professionals to try to stop them from cheating is to just make school about learning again and not writing essays don’t make it about having students
Turn in a word file and then you do a word count on it to make sure that it’s at least 5 000 words and then you do just a quick grammar check quick spelling check plagiarism and AI check and mind you all of this is automated
And then if it passes all of those automated tests then you just give it an A or a B because that’s what I think a lot of teachers are actually doing when they grade essays I know for a fact there is no way that teachers and certainly no way their professors with
Over 200 students per class is reading and really thinking about what is written in all of these students five thousand or ten thousand word essays there’s just no way I’m pretty sure that they use those automated tools like I talked about if you to just see if you follow directions because that’s what
It’s really about right did you write the essay did you do the number of words you’re supposed to do and then did you spell and use grammar directly and if you pass those then they might just skim over your writing give you an A or B
Based on what you wrote unless they get offended by it of course then they might give you an even lower score than a student who objectively wrote a worse essay like had a worse vocabulary and whatever other objective parameters you can grade an essay on and that’s really
The problem with essays as a teaching tool or as a grading tool they’re overused they’re not the best way to teach kids they’re not the best way to assess if people are learning things and the fact that it’s been automated with AI is probably just more evidence that it is antiquated
But I can’t expect public schools to fix themselves anytime soon they were broken long before I went through that system and they remained broken today so I’m just going to sit back and cheer for the AI making a mockery of this Antiquated education technique like and com attack the algorithm follow
Me on Odyssey and have a great day
Video “When Chat GPT Does ALL Your Homework” was uploaded on 01/11/2023 to Youtube Channel Mental Outlaw