False Alarm: Cheating fears over chatbots were overblown, says research

•  NATASHA SINGER

UNITED STATES: Last December, as high school and college students began trying out a new A.I. chatbot called ChatGPT to manufacture writing assignments, fears of mass cheating spread across the United States. To hinder bot-enabled plagiarism, some large public schools 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 popularization of A.I. chatbots has not boosted overall cheating rates in schools. In surveys this year of more than 40 U.S. high schools, some 60 to 70 percent of students said they had recently engaged in cheating — about the same percent as in previous years, Stanford education researchers said.

“There was a panic that these A.I. models will allow a whole new way of doing something that could be construed as cheating,” said 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 nonprofit she co-founded. But “we’re just not seeing the change in the data.”

ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI in San Francisco, began to capture the public imagination late last year with its ability to fabricate human-sounding essays and emails. Almost immediately, classroom technology boosters started promising that A.I. tools like ChatGPT would revolutionize education. And critics began warning that such tools — which liberally make stuff up — would enable widespread cheating, and amplify misinformation, in schools. Now the Stanford research, along with a recent report from the Pew Research Center, are challenging the notion that A.I. 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 A.I. tools. This fall, Pew Research Center surveyed more than 1,400 U.S. teenagers, aged 13 to 17, about their knowledge, use and views of ChatGPT. The results may seem counter-intuitive, given the plethora of panicked headlines last spring. Nearly one-third of teens said they had heard “nothing at all” about the chatbot, according to the Pew survey, conducted from Sept. 26 to Oct. 23, 2023. Another 44 percent said they had heard “a little” about it. Only 23 percent said they had heard a lot about ChatGPT. (The Pew survey did not ask the teens about other A.I. chatbots like Google’s Bard or OpenAI’s GPT-4.) Responses varied by race and household income. About 72 percent of white teens said they had heard about the chatbot compared with about 56 percent of Black teens, Pew said.

About 75 percent of teens in households with annual incomes of $75,000 or more said they had heard about ChatGPT, Pew found, compared to just 41 percent of teens in households with annual incomes of less than $30,000. Pew also asked teens whether they had ever used ChatGPT to help with their school-work. Only a small minority — 13 percent — said they had. The Pew survey results suggest that ChatGPT, at least for now, has not become the disruptive phenomenon in schools that proponents and critics forecast.