By Hannah Spears & Heather Kelly — Correspondents
Sharing is caring…or is it? Sharing a drink or a meal with loved ones and/or friends is a common occurrence. Yet at Sharon High School, sharing is going further than just a meal or drink with a couple of friends. Just over halfway through the 2023-2024 school year, teachers and students have seen a rapid increase in the misuse and abuse of AI as a tool to plagiarize essays, projects, writing assignments, and more.
AP Lit and Honors Junior English teacher, Ms. Lori Novick-Carson said, “AI can look like an easy shortcut to the completion of an assignment or essay. This shortcut is a very real temptation for students, especially when learning is difficult.”
Yet over the past few months, the tempting shortcut has shortcutted some students’ quarter grades.
Multiple incidents, with students across the grades, of using AI have occurred throughout the disciplines, but particularly in the English Department. Without the solving for x in Algebra or dates in History, English is primarily up to interpretation, making the class and department an easy target for students to use AI like ChatGPT.
In fact, many students hold more generous opinions toward AI than their teachers. Daniel Smily, a junior at Sharon High School, explained, “Overall, I am not entirely against AI. I believe that people fear that it will dominate and eventually run society, which is most likely going to happen, but I feel like AI can definitely teach students and provide them with a better understanding on a difficult topic that was taught in school.”
With both Gen Z and Gen Alpha being generations immersed in technology from their youth, it is vital that teachers are able to express the dangers of over relying on the Internet’s ability to produce information at fast rates, Ms. Novick-Carson stated. “AI won’t help us on job or internship interviews, it won’t help us learn to write with precision and concision, it won’t help us to speak about history, science, literature, math, etc. with mastery, and it won’t teach us how to problem solve or think out of the box.”
Many members of the community are wondering why more has not been done to prevent student access to AI. While the school does not currently have a specific policy on AI, the student handbook briefly mentions “inappropriate and/or unattributed use of AI” as a form of plagiarism.
Although the school has not widely talked about the consequences of plagiarism with students, some students believe that SHS has already done enough to prevent plagiarism.
“I think that the school has done more than enough to prevent the abuse of AI because of the various mandated software that have been installed on the school-issued Chromebooks,” Smily stated. Upon further thought, he added, “However, even though a majority of students use these computers, there are still a small minority who use personal computers. Therefore, the administration should maybe consider tactics to monitor those devices.”
While the invention of the Internet was something that advanced the world, there are still biases and false information that can be portrayed as the truth, the main danger of using AI other than the possible plagiarism issues. But despite the many negatives of over reliance on AI, there can be positives that can help our learning and development. Ms. Newman, a teacher who helps support the use of technology for learning both at our school and the elementary schools, remembers her first introduction to AI.
“I was introduced to generative AI, like Chat GPT, a little under a year and a half ago,” Mrs. Newman recalls. “It sent shock waves through the Ed Tech community, I immediately started trying it out and testing it.”
This new advancement in technology brought curiosity to the new site. But soon, teachers realized some of the students’ intentions for using the website and it was immediately blocked from the school computers.
So, as we move forward into a future where technology will continue to advance, it is important to remember that no AI can produce or replace the originality and creativity of the human mind, Ms. Novick-Carson said. “AI is designed to reproduce previously conceived ideas and understandings…Learning and teaching should encourage new ways of thinking and seeing…it’s the way we build a better world,” she concluded.
Generally, both students and teachers agree that by using AI in the right ways, learning can only be enhanced instead of hindered. So instead of the recent misuse, we have to look at AI as a helpful tool that can benefit our learning and that we as students can develop from.
As Ms. Newman added, “What we have to figure out for students is where is it going to help a student learn without short changing their learning.”
Related Coverage:
SHS News: Chat GPT: The AI Study Buddy — Convenience or Compromise? (April 11, 2023)
