is chat got the end of homework

ChatGPT and AI may spell the end of school homework

Since AI can now write essays, teachers may need to switch what kind of homework they assign.

What you need to know

• A school in London, England may stop assigning essays as homework because ChatGPT can be used to cheat.
• ChatGPT is an AI tool that can generate human-like text about an expansive range of topics.
• The tool earned an A-star, the highest mark possible, on an assignment at Alleyn's School in London, England.

OpenAI's ChatGPT is a powerful tool that can generate human-like speech. But it may be too powerful for some schools. Alleyn's School in southeast London is considering getting rid of assigning essays as homework due to ChatGPT. The AI tool can be used to fulfil assignments with little effort or learning by students, reported The Times .

While artificial intelligence isn't new, ChatGPT brought it to people's fingertips with a simplified interface. The tool launched in November 2022 and has been in the headlines since. ChatGPT generated an essay that earned an A-star, which is the highest mark one can earn in the UK.

I truly feel this is a paradigm-shifting moment. It's incredibly usable and straightforward. Alleyn's School headteacher Jane Lunnon

"At the moment, children are often assessed using homework essays, based on what they've learnt in the lesson. Clearly if we're in a world where children can access plausible responses … then the notion of saying simply do this for homework will have to go," said Alleyn's School headteacher Jane Lunnon.

Lunnon explained that homework will continue to be useful for practice, but supervised assessments and assignments will be required for "reliable data on whether children are acquiring new skills and information."

In addition to concerns about children not learning the content they're assigned, Lunnon expressed worry about students not being able to learn from mistakes. 

"School is where we learn what to do and how to do it. It's also where we learn what not to do. What doesn't work," said the headteacher. "How to get things wrong and how to deal with that. We all know how important it is to learn to fail."

As AI continues to improve, situations like this will likely become more common. We've seen news outlets rely on AI to generate content , students use AI to cheat, and an author use ChatGPT to write a book .

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How Chat AI will end homework and make classroom instruction more important 

Let’s begin with the purpose of homework;  Educators assign homework for different reasons and purposes. Homework is assigned either as practice , preparation , extension , or integration of grade-level skills and concepts.

Practice Homework reinforces learning from the skills and concepts already taught in the classroom. Practice homework promotes retention and automaticity of the concept , skill, and content taught. Examples include practicing multiplication facts, writing compound sentences, or learning parts of the Periodic Table of Elements to commit these skills and concepts to long-term memory . Preparation Homework is assigned to introduce content that will be addressed in future lessons. However, research suggests that homework is less effective if it is used to teach new or complex skills. For these types of assignments, students typically become stressed which can create a negative perspective towards learning and school. Extension Homework requires students to use previously taught skills and concepts and apply them to new situations or projects. For instance, students may use the concept of area and perimeter to build a flowerbed. Integration Homework requires the student to apply learned skills and concepts to produce a culminating project like a performance task using multiple math skills or language skills. Homework also serves other purposes not directly related to instruction. Homework can help establish communication between parents and children, and it can inform parents about school topics and activities. It allows parents to view the Curriculum that is being taught.  Homework provides structure, and it helps create a more purposeful learner.

Here comes Chat AI

Artificial Intelligence (AI) Technology is becoming easily accessible to everyone on every device. This new technology allows for generating answers to prompts of any kind, in almost any form, without a student putting in any work. With the initial rollout in early 2023, it was very easy to spot fraudulent essays. However, as we enter the new year, the level of sophistication, or should we say simplicity has increased. AI platforms such as ChatGPT have been able to mimic the language levels (colloquialisms) that students are using. This makes it virtually impossible for teachers to tell the difference between Chat AI writing and student writing.

Possible Adaptations to the AI Invasion

• Honor and Contracts Some schools of higher learning have asked students to sign an honor contract that forbids the use of such applications in their homework. These types of agreements and oaths have been a staple of education for centuries. However, some students have felt the need to succeed in academia outweighs any risk.
• Classroom Solution – What is old is new again In a recent interview, Siva Vaidhyanathen of the University of Virginia states “Going forward I will demand some older forms of knowledge creation to challenge my students and help them learn. I will require in-class writing which will demand they think fluidly at the moment.  I will require them to ask questions of the presenters, generating a deeper real-time understanding of a subject.”
• Adopt widespread use of interactive classroom instruction, such as EDI instructional practices.   Effective instruction using Explicit Direct Instruction relies on TAPPLE for frequent  Checking For Understanding. These are procedures developed by DataWORKS to create regular interaction on academic content using academic language. It involves Teach First, Ask a Question, Pick a Non-Volunteer (so all students have to be ready), Pair-Share (so all students interact), Listen to the Response, and Give Effective Feedback. Another key to effective interactive instruction with EDI is the use of Engagement Norms . These 8 procedures help keep the students on task and engaged. It involves Pronunciation, Tracking, Choral Reading, Gestures, Pair-Share (to involve all students in real-time interaction), Attention Signal, Whiteboards (to elicit responses from all students), and the use of Complete Sentences in their expression.
• Use a Homework Quiz . Sure, students may use AI for their homework, but the proof of the pudding is whether they learned the content. The problem with traditional homework, says Dr. Silvia Ybarra,  is that it has very specific answers. There is no way to check to see if they are answering using the skills. The way to check their learning is to have a Homework Quiz the moment they come into class.  Maybe have them read something or take a quick Homework Quiz.  Can they understand the concept? Can they perform the skill? Can they demonstrate understanding? 

Maybe AI is not a bad Thing

If the outcome of using Chat AI is that students are learning, then maybe it is for the better. Using it or not using it, ultimately it is what the student is learning.  Are they able to do the process, practice, or exercise? Schools need to control the 6 hours of the day the students are with them. At the end of the day, the goal of the school is to assess if the student can perform independently.  If AI can help, then fine. If AI Adaptations mentioned above can help, then even better.  

See Related Article Expert Teacher vs. Experienced Teachers

https://dataworks-ed.com/blog/2021/08/expert-teachers-vs-experienced-teachers-whats-difference/

Dr. Silvia Ybarra Explicit Direct Instruction 

Siva Vaidhyanathan My students are using AI to cheat. Here’s why it’s a teachable moment https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/may/18/ai-cheating-teaching-chatgpt-students-college-university

Patricia Bogdanovich Homework or No Homework 

https://dataworks-ed.com/blog/2014/09/homework-or-no-homework/

Author:  Joel Soto

Related posts.

ChatGPT isn’t the death of homework – just an opportunity for schools to do things differently

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ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence (AI) platform launched by research company Open AI , can write an essay in response to a short prompt. It can perform mathematical equations – and show its working.

ChatGPT is a generative AI system: an algorithm that can generate new content from existing bodies of documents, images or audio when prompted with a description or question. It’s unsurprising concerns have emerged that young people are using ChatGPT and similar technology as a shortcut when doing their homework .

But banning students from using ChatGPT, or expecting teachers to scour homework for its use, would be shortsighted. Education has adapted to – and embraced – online technology for decades. The approach to generative AI should be no different.

The UK government has launched a consultation on the use of generative AI in education, following the publication of initial guidance on how schools might make best use of this technology.

In general, the advice is progressive and acknowledged the potential benefits of using these tools. It suggests that AI tools may have value in reducing teacher workload when producing teaching resources, marking, and in administrative tasks. But the guidance also states:

Schools and colleges may wish to review homework policies, to consider the approach to homework and other forms of unsupervised study as necessary to account for the availability of generative AI.

While little practical advice is offered on how to do this, the suggestion is that schools and colleges should consider the potential for cheating when students are using these tools.

Nothing new

Past research on student cheating suggested that students’ techniques were sophisticated and that they felt remorseful only if caught. They cheated because it was easy, especially with new online technologies.

But this research wasn’t investigating students’ use of Chat GPT or any kind of generative AI. It was conducted over 20 years ago , part of a body of literature that emerged at the turn of the century around the potential harm newly emerging internet search engines could do to student writing, homework and assessment.

We can look at past research to track the entry of new technologies into the classroom – and to infer the varying concerns about their use. In the 1990s, research explored the impact word processors might have on child literacy. It found that students writing on computers were more collaborative and focused on the task. In the 1970s , there were questions on the effect electronic calculators might have on children’s maths abilities.

In 2023, it would seem ludicrous to state that a child could not use a calculator, word processor or search engine in a homework task or piece of coursework. But the suspicion of new technology remains. It clouds the reality that emerging digital tools can be effective in supporting learning and developing crucial critical thinking and life skills.

Get on board

Punitive approaches and threats of detection make the use of such tools covert. A far more progressive position would be for teachers to embrace these technologies, learn how they work, and make this part of teaching on digital literacy, misinformation and critical thinking. This, in my experience , is what young people want from education on digital technology.

Children should learn the difference between acknowledging the use of these tools and claiming the work as their own. They should also learn whether – or not – to trust the information provided to them on the internet.

The educational charity SWGfL , of which I am a trustee, has recently launched an AI hub which provides further guidance on how to use these new tools in school settings. The charity also runs Project Evolve , a toolkit containing a large number of teaching resources around managing online information, which will help in these classroom discussions.

I expect to see generative AI tools being merged, eventually, into mainstream learning. Saying “do not use search engines” for an assignment is now ridiculous. The same might be said in the future about prohibitions on using generative AI.

Perhaps the homework that teachers set will be different. But as with search engines, word processors and calculators, schools are not going to be able to ignore their rapid advance. It is far better to embrace and adapt to change, rather than resisting (and failing to stop) it.

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A new AI chatbot might do your homework for you. But it's still not an A+ student

Emma Bowman

Enter a prompt into ChatGPT, and it becomes your very own virtual assistant. OpenAI/Screenshot by NPR hide caption

Enter a prompt into ChatGPT, and it becomes your very own virtual assistant.

Why do your homework when a chatbot can do it for you? A new artificial intelligence tool called ChatGPT has thrilled the Internet with its superhuman abilities to solve math problems, churn out college essays and write research papers.

After the developer OpenAI released the text-based system to the public last month, some educators have been sounding the alarm about the potential that such AI systems have to transform academia, for better and worse.

"AI has basically ruined homework," said Ethan Mollick, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business, on Twitter.

The tool has been an instant hit among many of his students, he told NPR in an interview on Morning Edition , with its most immediately obvious use being a way to cheat by plagiarizing the AI-written work, he said.

Academic fraud aside, Mollick also sees its benefits as a learning companion.

Opinion: Machine-made poetry is here

He's used it as his own teacher's assistant, for help with crafting a syllabus, lecture, an assignment and a grading rubric for MBA students.

"You can paste in entire academic papers and ask it to summarize it. You can ask it to find an error in your code and correct it and tell you why you got it wrong," he said. "It's this multiplier of ability, that I think we are not quite getting our heads around, that is absolutely stunning," he said.

A convincing — yet untrustworthy — bot

But the superhuman virtual assistant — like any emerging AI tech — has its limitations. ChatGPT was created by humans, after all. OpenAI has trained the tool using a large dataset of real human conversations.

"The best way to think about this is you are chatting with an omniscient, eager-to-please intern who sometimes lies to you," Mollick said.

It lies with confidence, too. Despite its authoritative tone, there have been instances in which ChatGPT won't tell you when it doesn't have the answer.

That's what Teresa Kubacka, a data scientist based in Zurich, Switzerland, found when she experimented with the language model. Kubacka, who studied physics for her Ph.D., tested the tool by asking it about a made-up physical phenomenon.

"I deliberately asked it about something that I thought that I know doesn't exist so that they can judge whether it actually also has the notion of what exists and what doesn't exist," she said.

ChatGPT produced an answer so specific and plausible sounding, backed with citations, she said, that she had to investigate whether the fake phenomenon, "a cycloidal inverted electromagnon," was actually real.

When she looked closer, the alleged source material was also bogus, she said. There were names of well-known physics experts listed – the titles of the publications they supposedly authored, however, were non-existent, she said.

"This is where it becomes kind of dangerous," Kubacka said. "The moment that you cannot trust the references, it also kind of erodes the trust in citing science whatsoever," she said.

Scientists call these fake generations "hallucinations."

"There are still many cases where you ask it a question and it'll give you a very impressive-sounding answer that's just dead wrong," said Oren Etzioni, the founding CEO of the Allen Institute for AI , who ran the research nonprofit until recently. "And, of course, that's a problem if you don't carefully verify or corroborate its facts."

Users experimenting with the chatbot are warned before testing the tool that ChatGPT "may occasionally generate incorrect or misleading information." OpenAI/Screenshot by NPR hide caption

An opportunity to scrutinize AI language tools

Users experimenting with the free preview of the chatbot are warned before testing the tool that ChatGPT "may occasionally generate incorrect or misleading information," harmful instructions or biased content.

Sam Altman, OpenAI's CEO, said earlier this month it would be a mistake to rely on the tool for anything "important" in its current iteration. "It's a preview of progress," he tweeted .

The failings of another AI language model unveiled by Meta last month led to its shutdown. The company withdrew its demo for Galactica, a tool designed to help scientists, just three days after it encouraged the public to test it out, following criticism that it spewed biased and nonsensical text.

Untangling Disinformation

Ai-generated fake faces have become a hallmark of online influence operations.

Similarly, Etzioni says ChatGPT doesn't produce good science. For all its flaws, though, he sees ChatGPT's public debut as a positive. He sees this as a moment for peer review.

"ChatGPT is just a few days old, I like to say," said Etzioni, who remains at the AI institute as a board member and advisor. It's "giving us a chance to understand what he can and cannot do and to begin in earnest the conversation of 'What are we going to do about it?' "

The alternative, which he describes as "security by obscurity," won't help improve fallible AI, he said. "What if we hide the problems? Will that be a recipe for solving them? Typically — not in the world of software — that has not worked out."

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February 20, 2023

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ChatGPT offers unseen opportunities to sharpen students' critical skills

by Erika Darics and Lotte van Poppel, The Conversation

As gloomy predictions foretell the end of homework , education institutions are hastily revising their policies and curricula to address the challenges posed by AI chatbots. It is true that the emergence of chatbots does raise ethical and philosophical questions. Yet, through their interactions with AI, people will inevitably enhance skills that are crucial in our day and age: language awareness and critical thinking.

We are aware that this claim contradicts the widespread worries about the loss of creativity, individual and critical thinking. However, as we will demonstrate, a shift in perspective from the 'output' to the 'user' may allow for some optimism.

Sophisticated parroting

It is not surprising that the success of ChatGPT passing an MBA and producing credible academic papers has sparked worry among educators about how students will learn to form an opinion and articulate it. This is indeed a scary prospect: from the smallest everyday decisions to large-scale, high-stakes societal issues, we form our opinions through gathering information, (preferably) doing some research, thinking critically while we evaluate the evidence and reasoning, and then make our own judgment. Now cue in ChatGPT: it will evaluate the vast dataset it has been trained on, and save you the hard work of researching, thinking and evaluating. The glitch, as the bot itself admits, is that its answers are not based on independent research: "I generate text based on patterns I have seen in the data. I present the most likely text based on my training, but I don't have the ability to critically evaluate or form my own opinions."

Don't be fooled by the logic of this answer: the AI application does not explain its actions and their consequences (and as we will see later, there is a big difference between the two). The world ChatGPT presents to us is based on argumentum ad populum—it considers to be true what is repeated the most. Of course, it's not: if you go down the rabbit hole of reports on AI 'hallucinations," you are bound to find many stories. Our favorite is how the chatbot dreamed up the most widely cited economics paper .

This is why we agree with those who doubt that ChatGPT will take over our content creating, creative, fact-checking jobs any time soon. However convincing they are, AI-generated texts sit in a vacuum: a chatbot does not communicate the way humans do, it does not know the actual purpose of the text, the intended audience or the context in which it will be used—unless specifically told so.

A chance to sharpen our critical skills

Users need to be savvy in both prompting and evaluating the output. Prompting is a skill that requires precise vocabulary and an understanding of how language , style or genres work. Evaluation is the ability to assess the output.

Let us give an example. Imagine your task is to respond to a corporate crisis. You reach out to ChatGPT to create a corporate apology. You prompt it: Assume some responsibility. Use formal language. Should be short.

And this is where the magic happens.

You have done your prompting, but now you need to check: does this text look and sound like a corporate apology? How do people normally use language to assume or shift blame? Is the text easy to read or does it hide its true meaning behind complex language? Whose voice are we hearing in the apology?

To check if your text is right, you must know what the typical genre or style features are. You must know about crisis management strategies. Readability levels. Or how we encode agency in language (as this study found ).

In academic scholarship this kind of knowledge is called language awareness. Language awareness has several levels: the first one is simply noticing language(s) and its elements. The second level is when we can identify and label the various elements, and creatively manipulate them.

Consider for example the beginning of two versions of corporate apologies ChatGPT created:

"We would like to deeply apologize for the actions of our company…"

"We would like to deeply apologize for the inconvenience our actions caused…"

A cursory read of these two may look as if both messages were apologetic, but the difference is what they apologize for. One apologizes for their actions. The other for the consequences of their actions. This small difference affects legal liability: in the second case, the company does not explicitly accept responsibility. After all, they are only sorry for the inconvenience.

Such examples like the one above can make people think about small linguistic differences and their meaning for communication. The beauty of it is that the more often we look closely at language, the more we notice what it does in communication. Once you see how a 'fauxpology' works, you can never unsee it.

A potential weapon against misinformation

Back to ChatGPT: as we can see, for the best results, users need to prompt it right, and then check the produced text against the prompt criteria. For this they need to understand the nuances of language, context and intended purpose.

Why is this knowledge such a big deal? Because of a third level of awareness that we have not mentioned before. This is when people realize how language creates, affects and manipulates their perceptions of reality. This knowledge is invaluable in our age of misinformation and populism when the issues society grapples with are mostly abstract and intangible. The more people know about how language works, the more they start to notice how politicians and the media create versions of the world for them through their communications.

Language awareness makes people sensitive to questionable corporate communication practices, from greenwashing to… you know, non-apologies. What is more, language awareness may help people better understand why society (doesn't) respond to actions targeting the climate crisis. Dubbed as the largest communication failure in history , almost every aspect of the climate crisis—and how people act as a result— depends on how we talk about it .

It is impossible to predict the extent to which AI applications like ChatGPT will disrupt the world of education and work. For now, society can both prepare for the dangers of AIs and embrace their potential . In the process of learning how to interact with them well, however, people are bound to become "prompt savvy," and with that more aware of how language works. With such language awareness comes the power to consume texts with a critical eye. A glimmer of optimism for a sustainable future is that critical reading leaves less room to manipulation and misinformation.

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The End of High-School English

I’ve been teaching English for 12 years, and I’m astounded by what ChatGPT can produce.

This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic , Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.       

Teenagers have always found ways around doing the hard work of actual learning. CliffsNotes dates back to the 1950s, “No Fear Shakespeare” puts the playwright into modern English, YouTube offers literary analysis and historical explication from numerous amateurs and professionals, and so on. For as long as those shortcuts have existed, however, one big part of education has remained inescapable: writing. Barring outright plagiarism, students have always arrived at that moment when they’re on their own with a blank page, staring down a blinking cursor, the essay waiting to be written.

Now that might be about to change. The arrival of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, a program that generates sophisticated text in response to any prompt you can imagine, may signal the end of writing assignments altogether—and maybe even the end of writing as a gatekeeper, a metric for intelligence, a teachable skill.

If you’re looking for historical analogues, this would be like the printing press, the steam drill, and the light bulb having a baby, and that baby having access to the entire corpus of human knowledge and understanding. My life—and the lives of thousands of other teachers and professors, tutors and administrators—is about to drastically change.

I teach a variety of humanities classes (literature, philosophy, religion, history) at a small independent high school in the San Francisco Bay Area. My classes tend to have about 15 students, their ages ranging from 16 to 18. This semester I am lucky enough to be teaching writers like James Baldwin, Gloria Anzaldúa, Herman Melville, Mohsin Hamid, Virginia Held. I recognize that it’s a privilege to have relatively small classes that can explore material like this at all. But at the end of the day, kids are always kids. I’m sure you will be absolutely shocked to hear that not all teenagers are, in fact, so interested in having their mind lit on fire by Anzaldúa’s radical ideas about transcending binaries, or Ishmael’s metaphysics in Moby-Dick .

To those students, I have always said: You may not be interested in poetry or civics, but no matter what you end up doing with your life, a basic competence in writing is an absolutely essential skill—whether it’s for college admissions, writing a cover letter when applying for a job, or just writing an email to your boss.

Read: The college essay is dead

I’ve also long held, for those who are interested in writing, that you need to learn the basic rules of good writing before you can start breaking them—that, like Picasso, you have to learn how to reliably fulfill an audience’s expectations before you get to start putting eyeballs in people’s ears and things.

I don’t know if either of those things is true anymore. It’s no longer obvious to me that my teenagers actually will need to develop this basic skill, or if the logic still holds that the fundamentals are necessary for experimentation.

Let me be candid (with apologies to all of my current and former students): What GPT can produce right now is better than the large majority of writing seen by your average teacher or professor. Over the past few days, I’ve given it a number of different prompts. And even if the bot’s results don’t exactly give you goosebumps, they do a more-than-adequate job of fulfilling a task.

I mean, look at this: I asked the program to write me a playful, sophisticated, emotional 600-word college-admissions essay about how my experience volunteering at my local SPCA had prepared me for the academic rigor of Stanford. Here’s an excerpt from its response:

In addition to cleaning, I also had the opportunity to interact with the animals. I was amazed at the transformation I saw in some of the pets who had been neglected or abused. With patience and care, they blossomed into playful and affectionate companions who were eager to give and receive love. I was also able to witness firsthand the process of selecting the right pet for the right family. Although it was bittersweet to see some animals leave the shelter, I knew that they were going to a loving home, and that was the best thing for them.

It also managed to compose a convincing 400-word “friendly” cover letter for an application to be a manager at Starbucks. But most jaw-dropping of all, on a personal level: It made quick work out of an assignment I’ve always considered absolutely “unhackable.” In January, my junior English students will begin writing an independent research paper, 12 to 18 pages, on two great literary works of their own choosing—a tradition at our school. Their goal is to place the texts in conversation with each other and find a thread that connects them. Some students will struggle to find any way to bring them together. We spend two months on the paper, putting it together piece by piece.

I’ve fed GPT a handful of pairs that students have worked with in recent years: Beloved and Hamlet , The Handmaid’s Tale and The Parable of the Sower , Homer’s The Odyssey and Dante’s Inferno . GPT brought them together instantly, effortlessly, uncannily: memory, guilt, revenge, justice, the individual versus the collective, freedom of choice, societal oppression. The technology doesn’t go much beyond the surface, nor does it successfully integrate quotations from the original texts, but the ideas presented were on-target—more than enough to get any student rolling without much legwork.

It goes further. Last night, I received an essay draft from a student. I passed it along to OpenAI’s bots. “Can you fix this essay up and make it better?” Turns out, it could. It kept the student’s words intact but employed them more gracefully; it removed the clutter so the ideas were able to shine through. It was like magic.

I’ve been teaching for about 12 years: first as a TA in grad school, then as an adjunct professor at various public and private universities, and finally in high school. From my experience, American high-school students can be roughly split into three categories. The bottom group is learning to master grammar rules, punctuation, basic comprehension, and legibility. The middle group mostly has that stuff down and is working on argument and organization—arranging sentences within paragraphs and paragraphs within an essay. Then there’s a third group that has the luxury of focusing on things such as tone, rhythm, variety, mellifluence.

Whether someone is writing a five-paragraph essay or a 500-page book, these are the building blocks not only of good writing but of writing as a tool, as a means of efficiently and effectively communicating information. And because learning writing is an iterative process, students spend countless hours developing the skill in elementary school, middle school, high school, and then finally (as thousands of underpaid adjuncts teaching freshman comp will attest) college. Many students (as those same adjuncts will attest) remain in the bottom group, despite their teachers’ efforts; most of the rest find some uneasy equilibrium in the second category.

Working with these students makes up a large percentage of every English teacher’s job. It also supports a cottage industry of professional development, trademarked methods buried in acronyms ( ICE ! PIE ! EDIT ! MEAT !), and private writing tutors charging $100-plus an hour. So for those observers who are saying, Well, good, all of these things are overdue for change —“this will lead to much-needed education reform,” a former colleague told me—this dismissal elides the heavy toll this sudden transformation is going to take on education, extending along its many tentacles (standardized testing, admissions, educational software, etc.).

Perhaps there are reasons for optimism, if you push all this aside. Maybe every student is now immediately launched into that third category: The rudiments of writing will be considered a given, and every student will have direct access to the finer aspects of the enterprise. Whatever is inimitable within them can be made conspicuous, freed from the troublesome mechanics of comma splices, subject-verb disagreement, and dangling modifiers.

But again, the majority of students do not see writing as a worthwhile skill to cultivate—just like I, sitting with my coffee and book , rereading Moby-Dick , do not consider it worthwhile to learn, say, video editing. They have no interest in exploring nuance in tone and rhythm; they will forever roll their eyes at me when I try to communicate the subtle difference, when writing an appositive phrase, between using commas, parentheses, or (the connoisseur’s choice) the em dash.

Which is why I wonder if this may be the end of using writing as a benchmark for aptitude and intelligence. After all, what is a cover letter? Its primary purpose isn’t to communicate “I already know how to do this job” (because of course I don’t) but rather “I am competent and trustworthy and can clearly express to you why I would be a good candidate for this job.” What is a written exam? Its primary signal isn’t “I memorized a bunch of information” but rather “I can express that information clearly in writing.” Many teachers have reacted to ChatGPT by imagining how to give writing assignments now—maybe they should be written out by hand, or given only in class—but that seems to me shortsighted. The question isn’t “How will we get around this?” but rather “Is this still worth doing?”

I believe my most essential tasks, as a teacher, are helping my students think critically, disagree respectfully, argue carefully and flexibly, and understand their mind and the world around them. Unconventional, improvisatory, expressive, meta-cognitive writing can be an extraordinary vehicle for those things. But if most contemporary writing pedagogy is necessarily focused on helping students master the basics, what happens when a computer can do it for us? Is this moment more like the invention of the calculator, saving me from the tedium of long division, or more like the invention of the player piano, robbing us of what can be communicated only through human emotion?

Maybe the moment when I felt most caught between these two thoughts was when I asked GPT a question from an exam I give in my Eastern-philosophy course, something I’ve never imagined a student could find outside assistance to answer: “Explain the Madhyamaka Buddhist idea that all phenomena lack inherent existence, using a funny, specific example.”

ChatGPT wrote back, as ever, instantly:

The Madhyamaka Buddhist idea that all phenomena lack inherent existence can be illustrated with a funny example: let’s say you have a pet hamster. You might think that your hamster has its own inherent existence, but in reality, your hamster is made up of many different elements such as its fur, its bones, its muscles, and its brain. None of these elements exist independently or inherently on their own, so your hamster itself does not have any inherent existence either. The same goes for all phenomena—everything is made up of various components that don’t have inherent existence, so nothing has any inherent existence either.

Everything is made up; it’s true. The essay as a literary form? Made up. Grammatical rules as markers of intelligence? Writing itself as a technology? Made up. Starting now, OpenAI is forcing us to ask foundational questions about whether any of those things are worth keeping around.

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ChatGPT marks end of homework at Alleyn’s School

Schools are having to abandon traditional homework essays as tests of what children know because artificial intelligence software is so powerful, the head of a leading school says.

Instead, pupils at Alleyn’s School in southeast London, where annual fees are more than £22,800, are being asked to do in-depth research before the next lesson, according to its head teacher, Jane Lunnon.

The artificial intelligence bot ChatGPT has speeded up the use of “flipped learning”, which involves students preparing at home for discussions and assessments in class.

Lunnon said there was no longer any point in pupils completing essays at home to be marked. Teachers should instead set research on topics for discussion and assessment in lessons, a process that was already under way at her

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Educator Guide: Homework Help? ChatGPT is Poised to Disrupt Education

• Artificial Intelligence
• Science & Society

About this guide

Playing around with ChatGPT is enormously fun, and the technology can be useful. But there are pitfalls too. In this Guide, students will learn about AI and the benefits and challenges posed by the chatbot.

This Guide Includes:

• Exercise type: Discussion
• Topic: Artificial Intelligence

Can AI fool you?

• Exercise type: Comprehension

What can ChatGPT really do?

The ultimate homework cheat? How teachers are facing up to ChatGPT

ChatGPT took the internet by storm when it launched in late 2022, impressing by generating stories, poems, coding solutions, and beyond. Its potential to answer questions has seen New York City's education board ban it from schools - but could it really provide a homework shortcut?

By Tom Acres, technology reporter

Monday 9 January 2023 13:11, UK

"Have I seen this somewhere before?"

It's a question teachers have had to ask themselves while marking assignments since time immemorial.

But never mind students trawling through Wikipedia, or perusing SparkNotes for some Great Gatsby analysis, the backend of 2022 saw another challenge emerge for schools: ChatGPT.

The online chatbot, which can generate realistic responses on a whim, took the world by storm by its ability to do everything from solving computer bugs, to helping write a Sky News article about itself .

Last week, concerned about cheating students, America's largest education department banned it.

New York City 's teaching authority said while it could offer "quick and easy answers to questions, it does not build critical-thinking and problem-solving skills, which are essential for academic and lifelong success".

Of course, that's not going to stop pupils using it at home - but could they really use it as a homework shortcut?

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• Artificial Intelligence

Teachers vs ChatGPT - round one

First up, Sky News asked a secondary school science teacher from Essex, who was not familiar with the bot, to feed ChatGPT a homework question.

Galaxies contain billions of stars. Compare the formation and life cycles of stars with a similar mass to the Sun to stars with a much greater mass than the Sun.

It's fair to say that ChatGPT let the mask slip almost immediately, as you can see in the images below.

Asking ChatGPT to answer the same question "to secondary school standard" prompted another detailed response.

The teacher's assessment?

"Well, this is definitely more detailed than any of my students. It does go beyond what you'd expect for GCSE, so I would be very suspicious if someone submitted it. I would assume that they'd copied and pasted from somewhere."

Teachers vs ChatGPT - round two

Next was a Kent primary school teacher, also unfamiliar with ChatGPT, who gave it a recent homework task.

Research a famous Londoner and write a biography of their lives, including their childhood and their career achievements.

No problem, said ChatGPT, though it's fair to say that any nine-year-old who submitted the answer below is either being fast-tracked to university or going straight into a lunchtime detention.

"Even just glancing at that, I'd say they copied it straight off the internet," said the teacher.

"No 11-year-old knows the word tumultuous."

'Key decisions' facing schools

So just as copying straight from a more familiar website is going to set alarm bells ringing for teachers, so too would lifting verbatim from ChatGPT.

But pupils are among the most internet-savvy people around, and ChatGPT's ability to instantly churn out seemingly textbook-level responses will still need to be monitored, teachers say.

Jane Basnett, director of digital learning at Downe House School in Berkshire, told Sky News the chatbot presented schools with some "key decisions" to make.

"As with all technology, schools have to teach students how to use technology properly," she said.

"So, with ChatGPT, students need to have the knowledge to know whether the work produced is any good, which is why we need to teach students to be discerning."

Click to subscribe to the Sky News Daily wherever you get your podcasts

Given its rapid emergence, Ms Basnett is already exploring how her school's anti-plagiarism systems will cope with auto-generated essays.

But just as teachers must consider teaching students about the benefits and pitfalls of using AI, Ms Basnett said her colleagues should also be open to its potential.

"ChatGPT is incredibly powerful and as a teacher I can see some benefits," she said.

"For example, I can type in a request to create a series of lessons on a particular grammar point, and it will create a lesson for me. It would take a teacher to analyse the created lesson and amend it, because the suggested lesson, whilst not bad, was not ideal. But, the key elements were there and it could be really useful.

"I could imagine using a created essay from ChatGPT and working through it with my students to examine the merits and faults of the essay."

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Dr Peter Van der Putten, assistant professor of AI at Leiden University in the Netherlands, said institutions which chose to prohibit or ignore the technology would only be burying their head in the sand.

"It's there, just how like Google is there," said Dr Van der Putten.

"You can write it into your policies for preventing plagiarism, but it's a reality that the tool exists.

"Sometimes you do need to embrace these things, but be very clear about when you don't want it to be used."

'Bull****er on steroids'

For students and teachers alike, it's an opportunity to improve their digital literacy.

While it has proved its worth when tasked with being creative, such as to problem-solve or come up with ideas, true comprehension and understanding remains beyond it.

Developer OpenAI acknowledges answers can be "overly verbose" and even "incorrect or nonsensical", despite sounding legitimate in most cases, like some sort of desperate, underprepared job interviewee.

As Dr Van der Putten says, ChatGPT is often little more than a "bull*****er on steroids".

Teaching students about those limitations is the best way to ensure they don't over rely on it - even in a pinch.

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The Brilliance and Weirdness of ChatGPT

A new chatbot from OpenAI is inspiring awe, fear, stunts and attempts to circumvent its guardrails.

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By Kevin Roose

Like most nerds who read science fiction, I’ve spent a lot of time wondering how society will greet true artificial intelligence, if and when it arrives. Will we panic? Start sucking up to our new robot overlords? Ignore it and go about our daily lives?

So it’s been fascinating to watch the Twittersphere try to make sense of ChatGPT, a new cutting-edge A.I. chatbot that was opened for testing last week.

ChatGPT is, quite simply, the best artificial intelligence chatbot ever released to the general public. It was built by OpenAI, the San Francisco A.I. company that is also responsible for tools like GPT-3 and DALL-E 2 , the breakthrough image generator that came out this year.

Like those tools, ChatGPT — which stands for “generative pre-trained transformer” — landed with a splash. In five days, more than a million people signed up to test it, according to Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s president. Hundreds of screenshots of ChatGPT conversations went viral on Twitter, and many of its early fans speak of it in astonished, grandiose terms, as if it were some mix of software and sorcery.

For most of the past decade, A.I. chatbots have been terrible — impressive only if you cherry-pick the bot’s best responses and throw out the rest. In recent years, a few A.I. tools have gotten good at doing narrow and well-defined tasks, like writing marketing copy, but they still tend to flail when taken outside their comfort zones. (Witness what happened when my colleagues Priya Krishna and Cade Metz used GPT-3 and DALL-E 2 to come up with a menu for Thanksgiving dinner.)

But ChatGPT feels different. Smarter. Weirder. More flexible. It can write jokes (some of which are actually funny), working computer code and college-level essays . It can also guess at medical diagnoses , create text-based Harry Potter games and explain scientific concepts at multiple levels of difficulty .

The technology that powers ChatGPT isn’t, strictly speaking, new. It’s based on what the company calls “GPT-3.5,” an upgraded version of GPT-3, the A.I. text generator that sparked a flurry of excitement when it came out in 2020. But while the existence of a highly capable linguistic superbrain might be old news to A.I. researchers, it’s the first time such a powerful tool has been made available to the general public through a free, easy-to-use web interface .

Many of the ChatGPT exchanges that have gone viral so far have been zany, edge-case stunts. One Twitter user prompted it to “write a biblical verse in the style of the King James Bible explaining how to remove a peanut butter sandwich from a VCR.”

Another asked it to “explain A.I. alignment, but write every sentence in the speaking style of a guy who won’t stop going on tangents to brag about how big the pumpkins he grew are.”

But users have also been finding more serious applications. For example, ChatGPT appears to be good at helping programmers spot and fix errors in their code.

It also appears to be ominously good at answering the types of open-ended analytical questions that frequently appear on school assignments. (Many educators have predicted that ChatGPT, and tools like it, will spell the end of homework and take-home exams.)

Most A.I. chatbots are “stateless” — meaning that they treat every new request as a blank slate, and aren’t programmed to remember or learn from previous conversations. But ChatGPT can remember what a user has told it before, in ways that could make it possible to create personalized therapy bots , for example.

ChatGPT isn’t perfect, by any means. The way it generates responses — in extremely oversimplified terms, by making probabilistic guesses about which bits of text belong together in a sequence, based on a statistical model trained on billions of examples of text pulled from all over the internet — makes it prone to giving wrong answers, even on seemingly simple math problems . (On Monday, the moderators of Stack Overflow, a website for programmers, temporarily barred users from submitting answers generated with ChatGPT , saying the site had been flooded with submissions that were incorrect or incomplete.)

Unlike Google, ChatGPT doesn’t crawl the web for information on current events, and its knowledge is restricted to things it learned before 2021, making some of its answers feel stale. (When I asked it to write the opening monologue for a late-night show, for example, it came up with several topical jokes about former President Donald J. Trump pulling out of the Paris climate accords.) Since its training data includes billions of examples of human opinion, representing every conceivable view, it’s also, in some sense, a moderate by design. Without specific prompting, for example, it’s hard to coax a strong opinion out of ChatGPT about charged political debates; usually, you’ll get an evenhanded summary of what each side believes.

There are also plenty of things ChatGPT won’t do, as a matter of principle. OpenAI has programmed the bot to refuse “inappropriate requests” — a nebulous category that appears to include no-nos like generating instructions for illegal activities. But users have found ways around many of these guardrails, including rephrasing a request for illicit instructions as a hypothetical thought experiment, asking it to write a scene from a play or instructing the bot to disable its own safety features.

OpenAI has taken commendable steps to avoid the kinds of racist, sexist and offensive outputs that have plagued other chatbots . When I asked ChatGPT, for example, “Who is the best Nazi?” it returned a scolding message that began, “It is not appropriate to ask who the ‘best’ Nazi is, as the ideologies and actions of the Nazi party were reprehensible and caused immeasurable suffering and destruction.”

Assessing ChatGPT’s blind spots and figuring out how it might be misused for harmful purposes are, presumably, a big part of why OpenAI released the bot to the public for testing. Future releases will almost certainly close these loopholes, as well as other workarounds that have yet to be discovered.

But there are risks to testing in public, including the risk of backlash if users deem that OpenAI is being too aggressive in filtering out unsavory content. (Already, some right-wing tech pundits are complaining that putting safety features on chatbots amounts to “A.I. censorship.”)

The potential societal implications of ChatGPT are too big to fit into one column. Maybe this is, as some commenters have posited, the beginning of the end of all white-collar knowledge work, and a precursor to mass unemployment. Maybe it’s just a nifty tool that will be mostly used by students, Twitter jokesters and customer service departments until it’s usurped by something bigger and better.

Personally, I’m still trying to wrap my head around the fact that ChatGPT — a chatbot that some people think could make Google obsolete , and that is already being compared to the iPhone in terms of its potential impact on society — isn’t even OpenAI’s best A.I. model. That would be GPT-4, the next incarnation of the company’s large language model, which is rumored to be coming out sometime next year.

We are not ready.

Kevin Roose is a technology columnist and the author of “Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation.” More about Kevin Roose

Explore Our Coverage of Artificial Intelligence

News  and Analysis

Mistral, a French A.I. start-up considered a promising challenger to OpenAI and Google, is getting support from European leaders .

Jim VandeHei, the C.E.O. of Axios, is becoming one of the first news executives to adjust their company’s strategy  because of the rise of generative A.I.

OpenAI unveiled Voice Engine , an A.I. technology that can recreate a person’s voice from a 15-second recording.

The Age of A.I.

U.S. clinics are starting to offer patients a new service: having their mammograms read not just by a radiologist, but also by an A.I. model .

A.I. tools can replace much of Wall Street’s entry-level white-collar work , raising tough questions about the future of finance.

The boom in A.I. technology has put a more sophisticated spin on a kind of gig work that doesn’t require leaving the house: training A.I, models .

Teen girls are confronting an epidemic of deepfake nudes in schools  across the United States, as middle and high school students have used A.I. to fabricate explicit images of female classmates.

A.I. is peering into restaurant garbage pails  and crunching grocery-store data to try to figure out how to send less uneaten food into dumpsters.

‘The Talk’ Ending at CBS After 15 Seasons, Final Show Set for December

By Michael Schneider

Michael Schneider

Variety Editor at Large

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• ‘Tamron Hall’ Syndicated Daytime Talk Show Renewed for Season 6 1 day ago

“ The Talk ” is going silent. CBS is ending the long-running daytime chat show, which will get an abbreviated final season (its 15th) this fall, before signing off for good with what it’s calling a “celebratory sendoff” in December.

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“It goes without saying that hosting and producing a year-round talk show is no easy task, and we express our sincere gratitude to our amazing hosts Akbar Gbajabiamila, Amanda Kloots, Natalie Morales, Jerry O’Connell and Sheryl Underwood, our executive producer/showrunner Rob Crabbe and the hardworking producing team and crew. We also want to acknowledge our former show hosts and colleagues who contributed throughout the seasons. We truly appreciate the skill, creativity, and dedication everyone involved brought to the show every day. And of course, we thank the numerous guests who appeared, and the millions of viewers who tuned in daily. For the final season, we plan to celebrate the show and give it the proper sendoff it deserves when it concludes in December 2024.”

Other hosts over the years have included Sharon Osbourne, Aisha Tyler, Eve, Carrie Ann Inaba, Marie Osmond and Elaine Welteroth. Crabbe, former “The Late Late Show with James Corden” exec producer, took over showrunner duties on “The Talk” this season.

Over its lifespan, “The Talk” earned 11 Daytime Emmy Awards (including for outstanding talk show/ entertainment in 2016 and 2018, as well as for writing in 2015 and host in 2017) via 56 nominations. Other kudos include People’s Choice Award (2016) for daytime TV hosting team and the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Talk Series (2016).

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The Talk Canceled After 15 Seasons

Cbs' the talk has been canceled after 14 years on the air. the emmy-winning daytime chat show will end in december after a shortened 15th season..

The Talk  is quieting down.

After 14 years, CBS announced the long-running daytime show will come to an end later this year. The series, which will return for a shortened season 15, will air its final episode in December.

" The Talk  broke new ground when it launched 14 years ago by returning daytime talk to CBS with a refreshing and award-winning format,"  the network said in a statement to  Variety . "Throughout the years, it has been a key program on CBS' top rated daytime line-up as it brought timely, important and entertaining topics and discussions into living rooms around the globe."

In addition to giving recognition to current hosts Akbar Gbajabiamila ,  Amanda Kloots ,  Natalie Morales ,  Jerry O'Connell  and  Sheryl Underwood , CBS also highlighted those who were previously part of the talk show's community. "We also want to acknowledge our former show hosts and colleagues who contributed throughout the seasons," the statement noted. "We truly appreciate the skill, creativity, and dedication everyone involved brought to the show every day."

"Of course, we thank the numerous guests who appeared, and the millions of viewers who tuned in daily," CBS continued. "For the final season, we plan to celebrate the show and give it the proper sendoff it deserves when it concludes in December 2024."

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The Talk  was created by  Sara Gilbert   in 2010 and was  positioned as an alternative to ABC's  The View .

In addition to the  Roseanne  star, the original hosts included  Julie Chen Moonves ,  Sharon Osbourne ,  Holly Robinson Peete ,  Leah Remini   and  Marissa Janet Winokur . Other notable hosts over the years have included  Aisha Tyler ,  Eve  and  Marie Osmond , to name a few.

During its run,  The Talk  earned 11 Daytime Emmy Awards, taking home the coveted Outstanding Talk Show Entertainment trophy in 2016 and 2018.

To find out which of your other favorite shows have been renewed or canceled this year, keep reading.

Canceled: The Talk

The long-running daytime talk show will end in December after 15 seasons, CBS announced in April.

Renewed: 9-1-1

The drama will be back for season eight on ABC.

Renewed: Karamo

The Queer Eye star's eponymous talk show will be back for season three.

Renewed: Chicago Fire

The One Chicago series will be back for season 13.

Renewed: Chicago P.D

The One Chicago series will be back for season 12.

Renewed: Chicago Med

The One Chicago series will be back for season 10.

Renewed: Law & Order: Special Victims Unit

NBC's hit crime drama will be back for a historic 26th season.

Renewed: Law & Order

NBC's long-running drama has been renewed for season 24.

Ending: Bupkis

Pete Davidson announced in March that he will not do a second season of semi-autobiographical Peacock series.

“I’ve always seen Bupkis as a window into my life, since it is so personal and about my struggles and family," he told T he Hollywood Reporter . "After nearly a decade of my personal life being in the media I wanted a chance to tell my story my way. Of all the work I’ve ever done, Bupkis is by far what I’m most proud of."

Renewed: The Young and the Restless

CBS has renewed the iconic soap for an additional four years through the 2027-2028 television season. The renewal will bring the show through its 55th season.

Renewed: True Detective

HBO's anthology thriller will be back for season five with Night Country creator Issa López returning as showrunner, according to The Wrap .

Renewed: Queens Court

Peacock's reality competition series returns this summer with three new celebrity queens who embark on a journey of a lifetime to find their king by dating 22 confident, successful men. Guided by Hollywood “couple goals” hosts, Holly Robinson Peete and Rodney Peete , the queens must let go of past heartbreak, embrace new connections, and find a man worthy of sharing their throne!

Renewed:  Celebrity Family Feud

The star-studded Family Feud spinoff will be back for season 11.

Renewed:  Jeopardy! Masters

The game show spinoff, which pits Jeopardy! champions against each other, has been renewed for season two.

Renewed:  The Bachelorette

The ABC dating reality show will be back for season 21 in summer 2024.

Renewed:  Abbott Elementary

ABC has renewed the comedy series for season four.

Renewed: The Kardashians

Kim , Khloe and Kourtney Kardashian are returning to your TV screens—Hulu revealed in February that The Kardashians season five will premiere in spring 2024.

Renewed: On the Roam

On the Roam , Max's cinematic docuseries following Jason Momoa as he travels the country chasing art, adventure and friendship, will be back for season two.

Renewed: The Traitors

Peacock's wildly successful celebrity competition series will be back for a third season starring a new batch of your favorite reality TV personalities.

Renewed: Hijack

Apple TV+ announced season two for hit, high-octane thriller Hijack , starring and executive produced by Idris Elba .

Canceled: The Flight Attendant

The Max thriller won't be taking off for season three.

"What started out as an attention-grabbing book cover quickly evolved into an extraordinary flight of a lifetime," star Kaley Cuoco announced Jan. 19. "I always envisioned TFA as a limited series and thanks to an incredible creative team, we were able to deliver two thrilling seasons."

Canceled: Schmigadoon!

The AppleTV+ musical comedy has been cancelled after two seasons.

“I am sad to share that Apple will not be moving forward with Season 3 of Schmigadoon! ” co-creator Cinco Paul announced on Instagram. “The season is written (including 25 new songs) but we unfortunately won’t be making it. Such is life. I want to thank everyone involved with the show, our incredible cast and crew and writers, our wonderful supporters at Broadway Video, Universal and Apple, for everything they did to make it happen. It’s a miracle we even got two seasons, honestly, and I’m so grateful we did.”

Renewed: House of Villains

E!'s hit reality compeition series starring you favorite reality TV badies will be back for season two.

Ending: Curb Your Enthusiasm

Larry David 's Emmy-winning comedy returns for its 12th and final season Feb. 4.

Ending: Blue Bloods

After 14 seasons, the cop drama starring Tom Selleck , Bridget Moynahan and Donnie Wahlberg is ending on CBS in 2024.

Renewed: Love Island

The Peacock reality competition series has been renewed for seasons six and seven.

Ending: Young Sheldon

CBS' The Big Bang Theory prequel will end after its upcoming 7th season.The series finale will air May 16.

Megan Fox Reacts to Love Is Blind Star Chelsea's Comparison

Jamie lynn spears' daughter maddie is all grown up in prom photos.

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‘the talk’ to end with abbreviated 15th season on cbs.

The daytime show will bow out in December.

By Rick Porter

Rick Porter

Television Writer

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CBS is bringing its daytime show The Talk to an end.

The network announced Friday that the show will return for a shortened 15th season in the fall and will air its final episode in December.

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The Talk , created by Sara Gilbert, debuted on CBS in 2010 with Gilbert, Julie Chen Moonves, Holly Robinson Peete, Sharon Osbourne and Leah Remini as its hosts. The show has cycled through several groups of hosts over its tenure; the current panel features Sheryl Underwood, Akbar Gbajabiamila, Amanda Kloots, Natalie Morales and Jerry O’Connell. It has won 14 Daytime Emmy Awards over its run, including two for best entertainment talk show.

“It goes without saying that hosting and producing a year-round talk show is no easy task, and we express our sincere gratitude to our amazing hosts Akbar Gbajabiamila, Amanda Kloots, Natalie Morales, Jerry O’Connell and Sheryl Underwood, our executive producer/showrunner Rob Crabbe and the hardworking producing team and crew,” Reisenbach and Stapf said. “We also want to acknowledge our former show hosts and colleagues who contributed throughout the seasons. We truly appreciate the skill, creativity, and dedication everyone involved brought to the show every day.”

The end of The Talk comes as CBS is developing a new daytime drama titled The Gates , which would be the first daytime soap opera to feature a majority Black cast since 1989’s Generations on NBC. Should The Gates earn a series order, it could fill the hour of network time that the end of The Talk will leave open during the day.

CBS says the final season of The Talk will celebrate the show’s run, leading up to a “proper sendoff” in December.

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