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Young Gen Zers embrace OpenAI’s AI-powered chatbot, ChatGPTfor schoolwork, according to to a new survey by the Pew Research Center. But it is not clear that they are fully aware of the pitfalls of the technology.
In a follow-up to its 2023 survey on ChatGPT use among youth, Pew asked ~1,400 US-based teens ages 13 to 17 whether they used ChatGPT for homework or other assignments in the school Twenty-six percent said they had, double the number two years ago.
Just over half of the teenagers who responded to the survey – 54% – said that they think it is acceptable to use ChatGPT to search for new subjects. Twenty-nine percent said the AI tool was acceptable for math problems, and 18% said using ChatGPT to write essays was acceptable.
Considering the ways that ChatGPT can fail, the results are perhaps cause for alarm.
ChatGPT he’s not that great at math – and it’s not most reliable source of facts A recent one to study investigating whether cutting-edge AI can pass a PhD history test found that GPT-4othe default AI model that powers ChatGPT, might just answer questions a little more accurately than a person guessing randomly.
This same study found that ChatGPT is the weakest in areas such as social mobility and sub-Saharan African geopolitics, potentially relevant to the demographic of teenagers who report using it more in school. . According to the Pew survey, black and Hispanic teens are more likely than white teens to say they’ve used ChatGPT for schoolwork.
Research is unsurprisingly mixed on the pedagogical impact of ChatGPT. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania found that Turkish high school students with access to ChatGPT performed worse on a math test than students without access. In a separate to studythe researchers observed that German students using ChatGPT were able to find research materials more easily, but tended to synthesize those materials less skillfully than their peers who did not use ChatGPT.
In a separate survey Last year by Pew, a quarter of public K-12 teachers said that using AI tools like ChatGPT in education is doing more harm than good. A survey from the Rand Corporation and the Center on Reinventing Public Education, meanwhile, found that only 18% of K-12 educators use AI in their classroom.
