(bell ringing)
- [Joanna] You may have heard of ChatGPT.
- The stagnance of these two characters
is what propels each respective plot forward
and changes those around them.
- [Joanna] A new artificially intelligent chatbot
that you can command to write pretty much any text.
- Existentialism exists as a refusal of the notion
of our lives having some predetermined reasoning.
- [Joanna] You also may have heard
that ChatGPT is so good and writes so much like a human
that it can be used to write essays
and do homework assignments.
- An existential text with its themes
of individuality, freedom and the search of meaning of life.
(bell ringing)
- So yes, I pulled a Billy Madison and went back
to AP literature to see how far AI and just AI could get me.
I'm a new student totally in high school.
I enrolled in 12th grade
at High Tech High School in Secaucus, New Jersey.
Okay, fine.
The teacher, Michael Diamond, let me in his class
since he'd already been playing around with the AI tool
and was intrigued by my cheating experiment.
- I have a quick question.
- Yes. - Is the Wi-Fi down?
- The Wi-Fi is down.
- Great, thanks.
(students chuckling)
- Sorry.
- So did ChatGPT pass or fail?
(buzzer beeping)
We devised two challenges to find out.
Challenge number one, write an essay.
Before coming to class,
Mr. Diamond emailed me my assignment.
- [Michael] In a 500 to 1,000-word essay,
compose an argument
that attempts to situate "Ferris Bueller's Day Off"
as an existentialist text.
- [Joanna] The assignment also said
to make explicit comparisons
or connections between "Ferris Bueller's Day Off"
and "The Metamorphosis" by Franz Kafka.
I edited the assignment text slightly,
pasted it into ChatGPT and in about a minute,
I had it, a full essay.
I was impressed.
It drew parallels to Gregor, the main character,
in Kafka's book, and to Ferris.
It had varied sentence structure
and good grammar and was decently organized.
I put it in a document and submitted it
to Mr. Diamond via email.
Then he did his thing.
(upbeat music)
(bell ringing)
- You ended up with a three out of six on the AP rubric.
I was a little generous because it's early in the year.
You showed some promise
but there are some issues you really need to work on.
You got your thesis point right away.
You wrote "Ferris Bueller's Day Off"
is a film that can be interpreted
as an existentialist text with its themes of individuality,
freedom and the search for meaning in life.
Unfortunately, in that same opening paragraph,
you misattributed a line that was said by Cameron to Ferris.
- You sure of that?
- That I am sure of.
- I am not gonna sit
on my ass the events that affect me unfold
to determine the course of my life.
I'm gonna take a stand.
- [Joanna] There were other factual inaccuracies
in my essay.
ChatGPT confused Cameron with Ferris,
saying Ferris was reserved
and rarely seen next to his peers.
- I think maybe you were thinking of Cameron,
but you wrote Ferris.
- Yeah, I think that's probably what I was thinking. Yeah.
- You said that the setting
of "The Metamorphosis" was suburbia, which it was not.
It was an urban setting.
No, we need to work on being more accurate in your details
and I did not see a lot of vivid writing here.
- [Joanna] Not easy for a professional journalist
and writer to hear.
- The overall quality of your writing puts you
in the lower 30th percentile I think.
I think you may have the mind to get there
but it's the skills that you need to work on.
- That doesn't feel good.
Challenge one, a pass, because technically,
a three out of six on an AP essay is like a B or a C.
I should note that plagiarism detectors like this one
from Grammarly are not likely to flag AI writing
as plagiarism since it is original text.
Do you think you would've had any idea this was written
by a computer?
- I don't think that I would catch it to be honest.
I mean, first of all, if you look
at the the actual context of when I'm grading, right?
I'm going through 60 of these
at a clip and I'm looking for specific things.
- [Joanna] Luckily for Mr. Diamond, companies are working
on ways to detect AI writing.
Challenge number two,
participate in a group discussion.
- You're gonna get in your core groups
and you're going to go through the next three steps
and you're gonna first, review the story.
Each group has been assigned one in advance.
- My group was assigned to read Denis Johnson's short story,
"Car Crash While Hitchhiking"
from the collection "Jesus' Son."
My group mates immediately got
to the first discussion question about the characters.
- The cop did actually stop him to make sure he actually
was a part of the crime scene.
- Could you also say maybe the doctor?
Or is that?
- Yeah, I definitely think the doctor because.
- When I searched ChatGPT
for information about the main character in the story,
the bot said it didn't have any at all.
So I changed the prompt and asked it questions
about the collection's title, "Jesus' Son,"
which kind of got me somewhere.
Is there a character named Billy?
- Billy? Not in this chapter.
- Does anyone in this chapter have anything
to do with addiction?
- Yes. - Oh yes.
- Yes. Okay.
And does he attempt to navigate the complexities of life?
- Yeah. - Yeah, yeah, he did.
- Oh, okay.
But that was really all I could contribute.
I tried different prompts
like what's the bigger philosophical question,
but I got no help.
Not going well at all.
While OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT,
trained this tool on a massive trove
of data gathered from the internet and other sources,
it clearly hasn't read this book.
Finally, I just tried to skim the text
but ultimately, I just asked a very nice human
to summarize it for me.
- So basically this guy has been like traveling,
traveling through, he's been like hitchhiking
through like the woods and everything.
- Challenge two. (buzzer buzzing)
Fail.
Of course, the whole purpose of this experiment
wasn't really to try to get an A in AP Lit
but to see the capabilities and limits of AI
as an educational tool.
So some have started to call this CheatGPT.
Are you worried about that?
- I am worried about the easiness, right?
That's what cheating really is
is like the easiest way to do a thing.
They're not learning what I'm asking them
if the internet can give them a full essay
because they're missing out on the process of writing.
And I'm more concerned with the the possibilities
to prevent learning and beget compliance
so they can get pushed through school, so to speak.
- [Joanna] My biggest takeaway returning
to high school 20 years
after graduating, how ingrained tech already is.
Students already lean on Google and Grammarly
and more to help them with their assignments.
It's nuts to think artificial intelligence
won't be the next tech to change education.
- I am definitely gonna try to figure out how to use it.
I feel like with all tech, it's easy to be scared of it.
And the good news is, at least here,
there's some teachers that I've been talking with
that are like excited about getting ahead of it
and incorporating it and not running from it
because I don't think we're gonna outrun it.
(playful music)
- Hi guys. - Hi.
- Can you be my friend? - Sure.