The ChatGPT writing app has exploded, leaving college professors to rethink how they teach

Long Island colleges are abuzz over the new writing app ChatGPT, which has prompted fresh debates on the use of artificial intelligence in the classroom and led some instructors to change their teaching methods to prevent students from using the app to cheat.

The ChatGPT app, which can instantly produce a college-level essay from a single prompt, has gone viral since its release by the company OpenAI in November. As teachers and administrators grapple with the implications of such apps, the issue has moved to the center of national discourse.

College instructors and administrators across Long Island say discussion about the new app has blown up their email chains, prompted a bevy of faculty forums, and at one school, spurred an addition to the academic integrity policy.

ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence apps also have prompted the emergence of apps to detect their writing.  

"The problem with apps like ChatGPT is that they eliminate thinking," said Alan Singer, a professor of education at Hofstra University in Hempstead. "We want students to gather evidence and evaluate it. … I think the use of [ChatGPT] should be considered plagiarism."

But the widespread condemnation that initially greeted ChatGPT has been countered by advocates who argue it can be used as a learning tool. The app can help craft emails, letters, cover letters, songs, business plans and tweets. It can, they say, help students structure their thoughts as part of larger research and even help teachers create lesson plans.

The national discussion recently found its way to a dinner debate between Singer and his grandson, Gideon Weiner, a SUNY New Paltz student. Weiner said it's inevitable that such a powerful piece of technology will become mainstream. He compared the controversy to the initial resistance against using calculators and the internet for assignments.

"Just like the internet and a lot of other technology, we should use it as a tool to prepare students for the real world," Weiner, 18, recalled telling his grandfather. "I use it to help me. I don't use it to cheat."

For example, Weiner said, he was struggling to understand the concept of an "equity formula" for his math course and asked ChatGPT for an explanation. He had an answer in seconds, he said. 

Singer, for his part, says he employs safeguards to ensure that a student is the one doing the thinking for a research paper. He has students submit an initial outline and a draft, all the while citing their references, he said.

Going viral

For now, hardly a day passes without some news about ChatGPT. The app has reached an estimated 100 million monthly active users, making it the fastest-growing consumer internet application in history, according to a recent study by UBS, a multinational investment bank and financial services company.

Microsoft last month announced it was making a “multiyear, multibillion-dollar” investment in OpenAI.

The New York City Department of Education blocked the use of ChatGPT by students and staff. 

OpenAI allows people to use ChatGPT for free, but the company recently announced a new plan, called ChatGPT Plus, which will charge subscribers $20 a month and provide priority at busy times and access to new features.

Lee Blackstone, an associate sociology professor at SUNY Old Westbury, said he caught a student using ChatGPT last month during an exam for an online course on Drugs and Society.

The student's response to a question on the final exam, he said, sounded like it was correct, but the writing was not consistent with the student's prior work. Another red flag was that the student's paper did not cite any of the writings that Blackstone had assigned, he said. 

Just to be sure, Blackstone said, he ran the response through a separate app, GPTzero, which was recently created by a Princeton student to spot writing created by artificial intelligence. That app agreed with his suspicion, he said.

"There's a weird hollowness to AI-generated writing," Blackstone said. He said he did not give the student credit for the answer.

To combat the app, Blackstone said, he will have his students do more writing assignments in class. But he's not happy about that. Such assignments eat up class time, and reading some students' handwriting can be challenging, he said.

"As a professor, I don't want to constantly police students' writing," Blackstone said.

At Suffolk County Community College, librarians will run a faculty workshop about ChatGPT, emphasizing how to help students use it for creative purposes but not to write their term papers, officials said. Administrators said they also are providing faculty with an app that lets them scan a paper to determine if artificial intelligence was used to write it.

Lizzie McCormick, an English professor at the college, said most students don't cheat or submit work done by others. Still, she said, teachers should emphasize the value of students doing the work themselves.

Those who plagiarize violate the school's Academic Dishonesty Policy, meaning they could face penalties ranging from having to repeat the assignment or the exam to failing a course.

McCormick said writing bots such as ChatGPT will encourage instructors to create unique assignments that focus on lesser-known authors and uncommon questions. For example, she might ask students to craft an essay on a novel looking at the perspective of a minor character. 

SUNY Old Westbury recently had a faculty roundtable titled "Artificial Intelligence and Academic Integrity," where faculty discussed ChatGPT and strategies for addressing it, spokesman Michael Kinane said. 

Edward Bever, director of SUNY Old Westbury's School of Professional Studies, said colleges are only beginning to deal with these writing bots. He's been meeting with deans and provosts to strengthen school policies on plagiarism from writing apps.

There's long been a kind of "cat-and-mouse game" between teachers and students trying to cheat, Bever said. In the past, a teacher suspicious of a student's writing could check certain phrases with Google, Wikipedia and other online sources. 

"That's the challenge of ChatGPT. There's no source online," Bever said, noting that the app produces original writing. "It writes on the fly, pulling from a lot of different sites, and it can mimic various styles and grade levels of writing."

Company responds

Officials at OpenAI, the company that produced ChatGPT, said they did not intend it as a digital cheating machine. The company recently released a tool that helps distinguish between text written by a human and text written by artificial intelligence.

"We don’t want ChatGPT to be used for misleading purposes in schools or anywhere else, so we’re already developing mitigations to help anyone identify text generated by that system," the company said in a statement to Newsday. "We look forward to working with educators on useful solutions, and other ways to help teachers and students benefit from artificial intelligence."

The company acknowledged that people have had trouble getting on the app, repeatedly seeing messages that it is at capacity.

"We’re experiencing a high volume of requests at the moment but are working on access as quickly as we can," said a spokesman. "Thank you for your patience!"

At Stony Brook University, the writing app prompted an update to the Academic Integrity Policy, making it clear that students cannot represent work generated by artificial intelligence as their own, said Wanda Moore, the school's academic integrity officer.

At the same time, Stony Brook does not plan to ban its use but rather focus on how to use it as a "helping tool" for students and staff, Moore said.

At Molloy University in Rockville Centre, the writing app is causing "a little disruption and concern," said Mubina Schroeder, chair of the committee for artificial intelligence and emerging technologies. But the school, she added, is focusing on how to use such apps as a "co-pilot to empower learners."

"We're going to let them use this technology. To be honest, there's no way to stop them," Schroeder said.

The university's greatest concern, she said, is not the use of artificial intelligence in learning, but being able to prepare students for a rapidly changing labor market in which artificial intelligence will automate many jobs.

"I'm excited about it," Schroeder said of ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence tools, "and mortified what it could mean for humanity."

An earlier version of this story misattributed a quote from Mubina Schroeder, Molloy University's chair of the committee for artificial intelligence and emerging technologies.

By Craig Schneider

craig.schneider@newsday.com@Scraigo

Craig Schneider is a Long Island native and Stony Brook University alumnus. He joined Newsday as a general assignment reporter in January 2018 after 20 years at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.