A Teacher Asked ChatGPT If It Wrote A Student's Essay & It Took Credit For The Work — But The Student Proved It Was Lying
Should educators fight against AI technology or embrace it?
Drazen Zigic / CHUAN CHUAN / Shutterstock via Canva Educators are scrambling to combat the use of ChatGPT in the classroom. While some believe the educational benefits of using AI outweigh the cons of potential plagiarism, others believe the website should be banned on college campuses altogether.
The newness of AI technology seems to have a lot of people confused — including one teacher, who took a unique approach to checking if his student’s essay was plagiarized.
One teacher thought his student’s work was ‘too well done’ to be written by a human, so he asked the robot.
Sharing his story on the subreddit thread, "r/mildlyinfuriating," the college student explained that he was accused of cheating by his teacher because his essay seemed “too well done.”
Due to the quality of his work, the teacher assumed he must have used AI technology to complete it. “When I read your answers, they seemed very well done — almost too well done — so I asked ChatGPT if it had written them,” he writes in an email to his student. “It said it did write them, so I proceeded based on that information.”
The teacher gave his student a zero on the essay because ChatGPT said it wrote it.
The teacher thought that AI software taking the claim of an essay was enough proof to give his student a zero. The student — baffled by the grade he received for his hard work — reached out to his teacher to discuss the situation. The teacher explained that after running it through multiple AI detection sites, he realized that it was written by a human, and apologized for the misunderstanding.
“Based on this new information, I have adjusted your scores to reflect the fact that you did, indeed, write your own responses,” he writes. “Please accept my apologies for the misunderstanding.”
The student explained that originally the zero brought his grade down a lot, but seems to have no hard feelings toward his teacher, ending his post with, “Won’t ruin my life since the grade was fixed but like: WTF.”
Redditors theorized about the upcoming ways educators would try to prevent the use of AI in schoolwork.
Some Redditors believe teachers will change their class structure to eliminate the possibility of AI plagiarism, such as making students handwrite essays and other assignments. One user claims, “Schools are going back to paper and pencil over this.”
Others believe educators should incorporate AI technology in schoolwork. “Fighting the process of technology just does not work,” another Redditor argues. “This will eventually be like when teachers fought against calculators being in classrooms. They said we’d never have access to calculators all the time, but that proved to be quite wrong. Schools will have to adapt to these new technologies, and teach students how to use them properly.”
Many agree that educators should stop trying to fight against AI, and instead use its unreliability as a learning tool. “I hope teachers can learn into using it as a tool for critical thinking - which it is not capable of,” writes a third user. Another adds, “Always remember! ChatGPT lies CONFIDENTLY!!!”
Maddie Haley is a writer for YourTango's news and entertainment team. She covers pop culture, celebrity news, and entertainment.