PERRYSBURG, Ohio — Have you ever heard of ChatGPT? If not, you've heard of Alexa and Siri, right? All of them are forms of artificial intelligence, also known as AI.
"I believe is going to have the level of impact on society that electricity has had," the Chief AI strategist for advisory and consulting firm AI Leaders, Lisa Palmer, said.
This impact will be strongly felt in schools.
Tim Kitson and Chris Stein, two Perrysburg High School teachers, are first-row ticket holders to the ever-changing game of technology and students.
"When I first started we had computer carts where the laptops would roll around and you would get them once or twice a month if you were lucky," Kitson said.
Since then, a lot has changed. Students now walk around with cell phones, chrome books and rely on computers for their assignments.
Those assignments, though, could be done using artificial intelligence.
In ChatGPT, you can plug in something like "write me a 500-word essay in the form of an eighth-grade student about George Washington." It will spit out a paper that is similar to the writing style of someone in eighth grade.
"Especially in the classes that I teach where they have to think for themselves using depth of knowledge and critical thinking skills, it can be a little trying," Stein said.
Kitson said he's cautiously optimistic about AI and recognizes that every teacher will have to grapple with its potential effects in their classroom sooner or later.
How will teachers be able to tell the difference? WTOL 11 put Kitson to the test.
We gave him three essays -- two written by students and one written by ChatGPT -- and asked him to spot the AI-generated writing. He did.
Proper MLA format and in-text citations were the two red flags that Kitson said made it obvious.
"Could a competent student who paid attention doctor this and make it more convincing? Absolutely," Kitson said. "I want them to think about the long-term effect that would have on them though."
Even if a student did tweak the paper, there could be other signs.
"You've seen how they write and you understand the types of verbiage they use and the styles they have," Stein said. "I don't think that's something that AI can completely reproduce."
But even that obstacle can be surmounted.
"If you have examples of your writing style and you can load those examples of your writing style into the tool and tell it to remember that as your style and write a new essay about topic 'X' in my style, it is capable of doing that, of truly replicating your student's writing styles," AI strategist Palmer said.
When fall arrives and students return for the 2023-24 school year, it won't be so easy to tell what their style is, Stein said. But he has a potential solution: bring it back to old ways of paper and pencil.
"I'm getting away from them typing in class and actually using the computer to come up with it, so they have to actually physically write their material down," Stein said.
At Perrysburg and other schools, there are systems in place to catch plagiarism, but those systems have pitfalls.
"As a teacher, you never want to penalize a student because something is popping up in a plagiarism detector because it's highly likely that it's inaccurate," Palmer said. She said plagiarism detectors are typically only accurate 27-60% of the time.
"I believe that it is going to require a change in the way that we teach," Palmer said of the detectors' margins for error.
Changes for teachers don't always have to be bad, though.
"From a lesson planning perspective, for research, you can create custom learning plans that are designed for a specific student, and these are things that can be done in minutes, not hours," Palmer said.
Most AI tools and platforms are blocked during school hours on the school's WiFi.
"I think it's new enough that we want to get to know what it is and how to use it before we open it up to students," Kitson said.
Perrysburg Superintendent Tom Hosler said the district as a whole is looking into how AI could be used in the classroom.
"Why not let them write an essay using AI, then critique the style of the robots?" Hosler said. "Why not let them do research with AI and then put their own voice into the generated content as a writing exercise?"
ChatGPT is a relevant symbol of a society blessed with continuously advancing technology but cursed with not knowing how far it can go.
"It's on us to be responsible and to be good stewards of it," Kitson said. "It's a good opportunity to use AI, we just have to teach students how to use it well."
From writing a poem, creating a recipe or doing an assignment, there seems to be limitless possibilities AI could be capable of now and those possibilities continue to expand.
"It will fundamentally change the way that we go about every portion of our daily lives," Palmer said.