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"AI writes bland, no flavor content," said ELA teacher Brian Graham, left, seen here discussing curriculum with ELA teacher Tracy Apple. "It's what you would imagine writing would sound like. There's a tone problem." Turnitin.com is implementing an AI writing detector to its core writing integrity products as early as April. Photo by Advisor.
Posted March 15, 2023
By Katie Liang
Features Editor
The use of ChatGPT, an Artificial Intelligence model designed to follow instructions from prompts and produce detailed answers, has already been discovered by DDHS English teachers in their students' work.
San Francisco-based research laboratory OpenAI launched ChatGPT on Nov. 30, 2022 as an AI writing tool and has gained lots of recognition from tech investors since its release. Its algorithm is formulated to analyze data and text and then use those observations to produce a human-like response to the prompt it is given. The history of chatbots created by prominent tech companies had limited abilities and generated mainly primitive and basic responses to elementary questions, like asking an Alexa to add an item to a grocery list or sending automated messages for online food deliveries. ChatGPT is also able to distinguish errors in code and ask human-like questions to gain more context in order to solve the issue.
"I could tell a student used AI to do their assignment because the writing didn't match the tone of their usual voice or past writing," said ELA teacher Michelle Wood. "Plus, it didn't include quotes which had been cited in the way we practiced in class."
ChatGPT, or Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer, has generated lots of attention at David Douglas since its release last November. English teachers Steve Rivas, Brian Graham, and Wood have encountered AI influenced writing in their students' assignments. The main indicator was the tone of ChatGPT's produced text.
"AI writes bland, no flavor content," said Graham. "It's what you would imagine writing would sound like. There's a tone problem."
Turnitin.com is implementing an AI writing detector to its core writing integrity products as early as April. This added function, combined with Turnitin.com's current system, will aid teachers in detecting any plagiarism or generated text. Academic integrity is being threatened by the use of ChatGPT, but teachers and staff also believe there are potential benefits. For jobs that require lots of writing, ChatGPT makes it more efficient. It can be a learning tool. Educators can come up with new ways of teaching and brainstorming drafts. However, there is also an issue concerning the dependence on it. Potentially, people can lose their own critical thinking skills and not have the ability to answer questions without the help of AI.
"What will happen when a student who has relied on AI to do their work for them has to do a task at work that requires critical thinking or creative problem-solving or teamwork without a computer?" asked Wood. "[Or] when a customer or a boss is standing in front of them asking for an answer?"
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