Colleges and universities have been trying to fight against students using tools like ChatGPT to do class assignments and communicate. But here's a twist: Professors and educators are now turning to A.I. to prepare lessons, teach, and even grade students' work. We talk with NYT tech reporter Kashmir Hill about these conflicts on campus. Also, she shares what she learned after giving over her life for a week to A.I. tools, which wrote emails for her, planned her meals, chose what she should wear, and even created video messages for TikTok using her likeness and a clone of her voice.David Bianculli reviews a new documentary about John Lennon and Yoko Ono.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Chapter 1: What are the implications of AI in education?
But what happens when we start handing over even bigger tasks, like writing entire essays and work assignments, and asking AI to help us figure out what to eat and how to reply to emails? Well, professors say more and more students are using generative AI to write essays and complete homework assignments.
One survey by Pew Research found that about a third of teens say they use it regularly to help with schoolwork. But it's not just students. Professors are also using generative AI to write quizzes, lesson plans, and even soften their feedback. One academic called ChatGPT said, a calculator on steroids. And universities are working to establish guidelines and using software to track AI use.
But some students are now pushing back on that, saying that many of these detection tools are inaccurate. Well, today we're joined by New York Times tech reporter Kashmir Hill, who has been tracking how AI is reshaping daily life and the ethical gray zones it poses.
Last fall, Hill actually used AI to run her life for a week, choosing what to wear, eat, and do each day to see what the outcome would be. Hill is also the author of Your Face Belongs to Us, a secretive startup's quest to end privacy as we know it. which investigates the rise of facial recognition tech and its disturbing implications for civil liberties. Kashmir Hill, welcome back to Fresh Air.
Hi, Tanya. It's so nice to be here. You know, I was talking with a professor friend recently who said he really is in the middle of an existential crisis over AI. He teaches a writing intensive course called And he actually worries that with these tools, his job might not even exist in a few years.
And so I wanted to know from you, can you give us a sense of just how widespread the use of this generative AI is, how it's become kind of a commonplace on college campuses and schools?
Yeah, I mean, this has been going on for a few years now, basically ever since OpenAI launched ChatGPT. You know, students are using ChatGPT a lot to ask it questions, to answer problems, to help write essays. And I talked to professors and they told me, you know, they're very sensitive. sick of reading chat GPTEs because individuals think when they use this tool, it makes them so smart.
It helps them, you know, get such great insights. But for the professors that are reading this material, it all starts to sound the same.
That's because there are words and phrases that are used so commonly that then they become part of the generative AI and it's spit back out.
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Chapter 2: How are students using AI for assignments?
I would say two things that I heard were that professors should be transparent with students about how they're using AI, and they really need to review anything that comes out of the AI system to make sure that it's accurate, that it makes sense, that they should be bringing their expertise to the output, not just relying on the system.
And from what I was seeing, that was not always happening, and that's where things were going wrong.
You know, one of the things that I keep hearing about is how hit or miss these detection tools are as a way to combat this. And one of your colleagues at The Times actually just wrote an article about how sometimes these detection tools get it wrong.
There was a student in Houston who received a zero after a plagiarism detection tool identified her work as AI-generated, but she actually could prove that she wrote it herself. I was wondering, how common is this?
According to some studies, the AI detection services get it wrong anywhere from 6% to more. I have certainly heard many stories of students saying that it says that they used AI when they didn't. I actually heard this from professors as well that I talked to. People who are more sophisticated about the use of AI said they don't trust these detection systems.
One professor told me she had uploaded her own writing to it, and it said that her writing was AI-generated when she knew it wasn't. So there does seem to be some skepticism about these tools, and some universities no longer use them. And instead, professors told me that when they think that something is written by AI, they'll often talk to that student one-on-one about it.
But yeah, the systems, as I understand it, tend to be a little discriminatory, you know, for students for whom English is a second language. They often detect that writing as AI-generated when it's not. And there's some other ways it's kind of misjudging the writing of some types of students as being AI-generated.
I think one of the questions you posed in your piece that kind of hung in the air was whether there is actually going to be a point in the foreseeable future where, say, much of the graduate student teaching assistants' jobs can be done by AI. And I wondered if that is also something that you've been talking with academics about. Yeah.
So a couple of the professors that I spoke with had created kind of custom chatbots for their classes where they had uploaded past materials from the class or uploaded assignments that they had graded so that the chatbot could see how they grade, what kind of feedback they give.
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Chapter 3: What challenges do professors face with AI in the classroom?
Yeah, I wondered about that because that sets precedent, but GM isn't the only car manufacturer that provides this kind of technology.
Yeah, I mean, all the car makers are getting this kind of data from their cars. General Motors was the most aggressive about selling it, but there were other automakers that were starting to provide it as well. I think they're going to be more conservative in their approach now.
But I think for consumers, this was really upsetting because I think we're used to, to a certain extent, our smartphones bleed information about us because of apps that we download for free. But the idea that you would buy a car for $30,000, $50,000, $80,000, and they're still collecting data from it and selling it. was really, really upsetting for consumers. Yeah, I never know.
It's hard to know how much people care about privacy. People care about the privacy in their car. They think of that as a private space that shouldn't be monitored in ways that will harm them. That said, there could be benefits. to monitoring how people drive.
I talked to some experts who said, you know, there are certain insurance plans where you can sign up for this, where you can say, yeah, you can monitor my driving and I'll get a discount on my insurance.
Because it shows that I'm a good driver.
Yeah, exactly. And those people who sign up for those plans do tend to drive more safely and more conservatively. But they need to know that they're being monitored. And what was happening with GM, it wasn't kind of improving safety for all of us because those people driving GM cars didn't realize that their driving was being monitored.
You know, Kashmir, you're deep into this world because of your job. You've done these experiments. You've talked to so many experts.
After that article came out with your experiment back in the fall, you asked yourself, if you want to live in a world where we're using AI to make all of our decisions all the time, it almost feels like that's not even a question really because we are seeing it in real time. But I'm just wondering, what did you come to?
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