New York Public Schools Ban Access to AI Tool That Could Help Students Cheat | CNN Business

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New York City Public Schools will ban students and teachers from using ChatGPT, a powerful new AI chatbot tool, on district networks and devices, an official confirmed to CNN on Thursday.

The move comes amid growing concern that the tool, which generates strangely compelling answers and even essays in response to user prompts, could make it easier for students to cheat on assignments. Some also worry that ChatGPT could be used to spread inaccurate information.

“Due to concerns about negative impacts on student learning and concerns about the security and accuracy of content, access to ChatGPT is restricted to New York Public Schools networks and devices,” Jenna Lyle, deputy press secretary of the New York Public. schools, he said in a statement. “While the tool may provide quick and easy answers to questions, it does not build critical thinking and problem-solving skills, which are essential for academic and lifelong success.”

While the chatbot is restricted under the new policy, New York City Public Schools can request specific access to the tool for educational purposes related to AI and technology.

Education publication ChalkBeat first reported the news.

OpenAI, the artificial intelligence research lab behind the tool, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

New York City appears to be the first major school district to crack down on ChatGPT, barely a month after the tool was launched. While there are real concerns about how ChatGPT might be used, it is unclear how widely it is being adopted among students. Other districts, meanwhile, seem to be making more slow progress.

A representative for the Palo Alto Unified School District in California told CNN, “We haven’t talked about it yet.” Meanwhile, a spokesperson for the Philadelphia school district said it is “not aware of any students using ChatGPT, nor have we received any complaints from principals or teachers.”

OpenAI opened access to ChatGPT at the end of November. Able to provide long, thoughtful, and comprehensive answers to questions and prompts, ranging from factual questions such as “Who was the president of the United States in 1955” to more open-ended questions such as “What is the meaning of life ?”

The tool surprised users, including academics and some in the tech industry. ChatGPT is a great language model built on a wealth of online information to create your answers. It comes from the same company behind DALL-E, which generates a seemingly limitless range of images in response to user requests.

ChatGPT went viral within days of its launch. Open AI co-founder Sam Altman, a prominent Silicon Valley investor, said on Twitter early December that ChatGPT had passed one million users.

But many educators worry that students will use the tool to cheat on assignments. One user, for example, gave ChatGPT an AP English exam question; answered with a 5 paragraph essay about Wuthering Heights. Another user asked the chatbot to write an essay on the life of William Shakespeare four times; received a single version with the same message every time.

Darren Hicks, an assistant professor of philosophy at Furman University, previously told CNN that it will be harder to prove when a student misuses ChatGPT than other forms of cheating.

“In the more traditional forms of plagiarism (cheating on the Internet, pasting things), I can go and find additional evidence, evidence that I can then bring to a board hearing,” he said. “In this case, there’s nothing you can point to and say, ‘Here’s the stuff they took.'”

“It’s really a new take on an old problem where students would pay someone or get someone to write their paper for them, say an essay farm or a friend who’s taken a course before,” he said. add Hicks. “That’s right it’s just instant and free.”

Some companies like Turnitin, a detection tool that thousands of school districts use to scan the Internet for signs of plagiarism, are now investigating how their software could detect the use of AI-generated text in student presentations.

Hicks said teachers will need to reframe assignments so the tool can’t easily type them. “The biggest problem,” Hicks added, “is going to be administrations figuring out how they’re going to try these kinds of cases.”

– CNN’s Abby Phillip contributed to this report.