OHIO — ChatGPT launched in Nov. 2022, and it is now backed by Microsoft.

 

What You Need To Know

  • A new artificial intelligence (AI) writing program has the ability to write essays and other written assignments in a matter of seconds 

  • This program launched in Nov. 2022, and is now backed by Microsoft 

  • Educators at Kent State University are learning how to navigate this new technology 

 

It is a free-to-use online artificial writing software. The program has the ability to write with little to no human input in a matter of seconds.

Since this program is so new, education professionals like Jennifer Marcinkiewicz, the director of the Center of Teaching and Learning, at Kent State University are still figuring out how to navigate classrooms with this new technology.  

“It honestly does concern me,” Marcinkiewicz said.

She said one of her biggest concerns with these programs is it may reduce student learning.

“College writing, for example,” she said. “It’s really hard to evaluate someone's learning if they are submitting work that’s been generated by an AI program.”

Sarah Beal is a professional development specialist at KSU, and she lead an AI writing workshop for more than 100 faculty members earlier this month. 

“We had a really great conversation, getting to hear what concerns they had,” Beal said. “Also, start thinking about teaching strategies we can use to live with this technology, because it is not going to go away. So we need to find ways to live with it and work with it.” 

Beal pulled up a website called GPTZero that educators can use to help spot if something was written by an AI, but she said it is not always 100% accurate. 

“What you do is take the text that you would like to run through the checker and paste it in the box, and what GPTZero does is it looks for the predictability of your text,” Beal said. “I ran something I wrote and compared it to something that ChatGPT had written and it gave us both very similar scores, so it thinks that I am an AI as well.” 

Beal said she’s looking forward to seeing how professors will incorporate this new technology into their classrooms. 

“Maybe give your students things that were generated by ChatGPT and ask them to critique it,” she said. “Ask them, ‘how would you make this a better response?’ this is currently, maybe a C level paper, let’s make it an A level paper’ and talk about what goes into that process.”