3 March 2023
WICHITA, Kan. (KSNW) — Wichita Public Schools — USD 259 is working at a rapid-fire pace to stop students from using the popular chatbot “ChatGPT” to cheat in school.
Just two months after the chatbot launched last November, ChatGPT has more than 100 million users. Tech expert Bill Ramsey, CEO of Soteria Technology Solutions, says because the responses the chatbot gives are so well-crafted, it’s extremely difficult to tell you’re actually reading something written by AI.
“People are already using it to write books,” Ramsey said. “Entire books because it’s very, very good at that.”
Ramsey says when given the right parameters, working with ChatGPT can be an eye-opening experience.
“We have a person in our office, we say, ‘Hey, we need a PowerShell script,’ we hand it to him, and a couple hours later he’s done it, and he’s got it tested, and it works … this thing will generate that in about ten seconds,” Ramsey said.
For USD 259 staff, concerns students will use the chatbot to cheat are front and center.
“These are some new waters that we kinda live in education,” Rob Dickson, the Chief Information Officer for USD 259, said. “We block, obviously, access at school here, and our filter also follows those students home with the device.”
Dickson says the district has held training sessions for staff at nine different middle and high schools so far.
“As teachers utilize it, then they have a better awareness of what comes out of it so that they can be aware of when students use it,” Dickson said.
Dickson says two AI detector apps on the market show promise. However, Ramsey anticipates AI detectors will only provide a temporary fix.
“Is the AI going to be able to adapt? That’s the scary part,” Ramsey said. “If it can say, ‘Hey, I understand what it’s looking for, and I’ll adapt myself to overcome that,’ now we’re in a cat-and-mouse game.”
Dickson says another challenge to catching cheaters lies within a feature of the chatbot itself: inputting the same prompt over and over doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll get the exact same response each time.
“When you’re in Chat, and you do ‘end response,’ you can say ‘rewrite’…you can also say ‘rewrite as a fifth grader,’ or ‘rewrite as a sixth grader,’ and it will change it to the nomenclature of that grade level,” Dickson said.