ChatGPT is a chatbot powered by AI that’s popular among younger Gen Zers for schoolwork. According to a new survey conducted by the Pew Research Center. It’s not clear if they are fully aware of its pitfalls.
As a follow-up on its 2023 survey on ChatGPT use among young people, Pew surveyed 1,400 U.S. teens aged 13 to 17 years old to ask if they had used ChatGPT to do homework or complete other school-related tasks. Twenty-six per cent said they had used ChatGPT, which is double the number from two years ago.
A little over half of teens who responded to the survey — 54% — believe it’s acceptable to utilize ChatGPT to research new subjects. 29 percent of teens said that the AI tool is acceptable for solving math problems. 18% said that using ChatGPT when writing essays is acceptable.
The results may be alarming, given the ways ChatGPT falls short.
ChatGPT doesn’t do math very well — and it isn’t the best. Most reliable source for facts. A recent A study that investigated whether leading AI could pass a doctorate level history test found GPT-4o, which is the default AI model used by ChatGPT, was only able to answer questions slightly better than a person guessing randomly.
This same study found ChatGPT’s weakest areas are social mobility and geopolitics in Sub-Saharan Africa. These could be relevant to the demographics for teens who use it most in school. According to Pew’s survey, Black and Hispanic teenagers are more likely than White teens to have used ChatGPT in school-related tasks.
The research is, unsurprisingly, mixed on ChatGPT’s pedagogical impacts. University of Pennsylvania researchers The studyfound that Turkish high schoolers with access to ChatGPT performed worse on a mathematics test than students without access. In a separate Researchers found that German students who used ChatGPT were more likely to find research material, but they synthesized it less effectively than their peers who did not use ChatGPT.
A separate A Pew pollconducted last year found that a quarter (25%) of K-12 teachers believe that using AI tools such as ChatGPT to improve education is more harmful than beneficial. A Pew surveyconducted last year found that a quarter of public K-12 teachers said using AI tools like ChatGPT in education does more harm than good. A surveyconducted by the Rand Corporation and Center on Reinventing Public Education found that only 18% of K-12 teachers use AI in the classroom.
TechCrunch offers a newsletter focusing on AI! Sign up to receive it every Wednesday in your inbox.
Kyle Wiggers, a senior reporter for TechCrunch, has a special interest on artificial intelligence. His writings have appeared in VentureBeat, Digital Trends and a variety of gadget blogs, including Android Police and Android Authority, Droid-Life and XDA-Developers. He lives in Brooklyn, with his partner who is a piano teacher, and plays the piano occasionally. Sometimes — but mostly unsuccessfully.
View Bio