Cheating fears over chatbots were overblown, new research suggests

NEW YORK - In December 2022, as high school and college students began trying out a new artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot called ChatGPT to manufacture writing assignments, fears of mass cheating spread across the United States.

To hinder bot-enabled plagiarism, some large public school districts – including those in Los Angeles, Seattle and New York City – quickly blocked ChatGPT on school-issued laptops and school Wi-Fi.

But the alarm may have been overblown – at least in high schools.

According to new research from Stanford University, the popularisation of AI chatbots has not boosted overall cheating rates in schools.

In surveys in 2023 of more than 40 US high schools, some 60 per cent to 70 per cent of students said they had recently engaged in cheating – about the same percentage as in previous years, Stanford education researchers said.

“There was a panic that these AI models will allow a whole new way of doing something that could be construed as cheating,” said Dr Denise Pope, a senior lecturer at Stanford Graduate School of Education, who has surveyed high school students for more than a decade through an education non-profit she co-founded.

But “we’re just not seeing the change in the data”.

ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI, began to capture the public imagination in late 2022 with its ability to fabricate human-sounding essays and e-mails.

Almost immediately, classroom technology boosters started promising that AI tools like ChatGPT would revolutionise education.

And critics began warning that such tools – which liberally make things up –

would enable widespread cheating

and amplify misinformation in schools.

Now the Stanford research, along with a recent report from the Pew Research Centre, is challenging the notion that AI chatbots are upending public schools.

Many teens know little about ChatGPT, Pew found, and most say they have never used it for schoolwork. Those trends could change, of course, as more high school students become familiar with AI tools.

The new research does not shed light on how frequently college students may employ chatbots as cheating bots. The Stanford and Pew researchers did not survey college students about their use of AI tools.
NYTIMES