When it comes to homework, students love shortcuts. Math teachers have battled against online formula calculators for years, and now English teachers are having to step in as well due to generative AI becoming widespread in the past year. Generative AIs such as ChatGPT or DALLE-2 are capable of creating almost any script or picture it is prompted with, making the lives of many students easier, while creating nothing but complications for teachers. With how strong AI has become, it is difficult to know what is AI and what is real.
English teacher Elizabeth Peterson stated that she has a similar honor code for both her freshman and Vantage students that “falls in conjunction with CollegeBoard’s rules.” When asked how she keeps her students from using AI, she stated that “checkpoints along the way and working one-on-one with students can help [her] see that students are being productive.”
On the other side of the coin, students have many different views on the subject. When asked about the use of AI by students in classrooms, Peter Rickman, ‘26, says that, “It’s terrible… we gotta stop having kids use AI because it just limits their real knowledge,” while Elliott Burrows, ‘26, says that, “you can use it for good things that it should be used for, but don’t use it to write your whole assignment.”
To get an AI to match one specific writing style, it needs a sample. Simple enough for most students, just copy and paste a few old essays into ChatGPT and it spits out a new essay, easy as that. Despite the many moral qualms that come from that style of generation, cheating to name one, what happens when an AI tries to copy someone else’s style is even less simple, morally speaking.
Say someone was starving for more Lord of the Rings books but Tolkien can’t write them anymore. They ask an AI to write some sample chapters of a sequel and it spits out something passable. To get even these passable words, the AI had to steal them. In order to train it to copy something well, it needs to read it over and over again, even if it’s copyrighted.
This is the dilemma of AI. While being a great tool for plenty of reasons, it gets its words and drawings off the backs of artists and writers. The next time you ask an AI for help with something as simple as cooking an egg, be mindful of its effects on everybody it took from.
