AI is blamed for the tsunami of cheating in the U.S. Educational System in recent years. I spoke to a professor this week who described how bad things have gotten, especially when it comes AI-generated essays. OpenAI, one of the biggest players in the AI industry, has announced that it will launch a tool to help students learn things instead of passively accepting dubious data delivered by a bot.
Today we’re introducing a study mode in ChatGPT – a learning experience that helps students work through problems step-by-step instead of just getting answers,” the company wrote In a blog posted Tuesday. OpenAI announced that the service was now available to all “logged-in users” who have accounts in the Free, Plus Pro, or Team tiers. The company said that the service will be rolled out within the next few week for ChatGPT Edu (), a account tier designed specifically for college campuses. According to the company
Study Mode is designed to engage students through interactive questions and answers. Study Mode, with its quasi-Socratic nature is designed to keep users mentally active, unlike the AI version that involves slack-jawed pasting of content created by a chatbot in a Word document. The company claims that students are “met with guiding question” which “calibrates responses to their objective and skills level to help them develop deeper understanding”. The post states that “Study Mode is designed to be interactive and engaging, and to help learners learn something–not simply finish something.”
OpenAI admits that its own industry is implicated in the rise of automated cheating at colleges and high schools. The company writes that AI’s use in education has raised an important question, “How do we ensure that it’s used to support real education, and doesn’t simply offer solutions without helping the students make sense of them?”.
It’s nice that OpenAI created a tool to encourage students to use their brains. But the real question is whether students will use it. Kids cheat because it’s easy Those who are intrinsically motivated to study might find it useful. However, recent studies claim that increased AI usage while studying could contribute to a shallower understanding of the topics being studied.
