The modern world has brought new technology to help benefit the masses, but the question on if technology has gone too far is always brought up.

“Every time new technology comes out a certain segment of the population is always willing to try it out,” English teacher Matt Van Boening said.

Meet ChatGPT, a website in which you write a prompt and an AI creates text that follows the prompt.

“You can ask it something, even complicated things, and it goes out and searches its database, which is now literally like billions of web pages, and puts together responses in kind of a natural human way,” Computer Programming teacher Jeffrey Yearout said.

The website has caused immense discourse, even among staff here.

“We live in the 21st century, and it’s another piece of technology that we have to reckon with,” Van Boening said. 

And how much do the students even know?

“It’s just capable of doing a lot of things like writing essays, giving advice on coding. I’ve heard that it can play chess to some degree,” sophomore Justin Tang said.

The question on how the student population would use this new technology is an issue, most notably on if students would use this as a way to write whole essays.

“I have heard there has been some cases where students have been caught using it,” English teacher Chanel Marshall said, “Not in this school but like other schools. But it could be in this school I don’t know.”

The thought that students will use it to write whole essays isn’t a positive one.

“If you use it so you can then figure out and understand something, that’s one thing. If you use (it) just to get an answer and be done with something, that’s no different than copying someone else’s homework,” Yearout said.

Though the AI seems formidable, it isn’t flawless.

“If you’re well-versed on writing yourself and how things should flow, how certain things should be structured, there will be some clues that would kind of tip you off that it’s AI generated,” Yearout said.

The English teachers seem to think they could be able to identify the AI, too.

“I think the more I become familiar with it, the more I would be able to maybe pick out markers that it has,” Van Boening said. 

“As a teacher you have to know your students well enough and have seen their normal work enough to be able to tell ‘Ok this is different from what they normally do’,” Marshall said.

Students believe that the AI can be identified too.

“The stuff about plagiarism, essays and stuff, I think it can be negated because as new technologies get made, new security measures are also going to get improved upon that,” Tang said.

Websites to identify AI from real writing are being used.

“I know there’s some tools now that are coming out to help with identifying if something was created with an AI tool like ChatGPT,” Marshall said.

Ironically, those websites are run by AI, too.

“There actually are AI systems to detect it, though, that exist out there that look at it and score it based on how it’s writing things, so there’s actually AI for the AI,” Yearout said.

But could Chat GPT actually be used to help students?

“I feel like the way to maybe combat it a little bit is like us teachers, rather than just trying to ban it outright – which never works, let’s be honest – is to kind of embrace and show students how, ‘yes, you can use it’, but use it as a starting point rather than just using it as a replacement for doing their work,” Marshall said. “If a student is struggling with ‘how do I phrase this?’ or ‘how do I reword this?’ or something like that, then it could be a really good tool for that.”

But one thing is for sure, ChatGPT is here to stay.

“This type of AI is going to become the search engines, so we’re going to have to figure out ‘how do we deal with that in the workplace, in school,” Yearout said.

“The more that we learn about that technology, the more we’re able to deal with it better and become more familiar with it,” Van Boening said.