Professor is horrified

when students in an ethics course use ChatGPT to create “Briefly Introduce Yourself” assignments.

“Impossible to be pessimistic enough about it to be honest.”

An icebreaker

It’s no secret that more and more students are using ChatGPT to write essays and do homework assignments. Instructors are also starting to use the program themselves, grading papers and creating exam questions with it.
But it’s astounding how much technology is influencing education.

According to Business Insider, Megan Fritts, a philosophy professor at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, was taken aback when she learned that her students were using ChatGPT for their very first task, which was to “briefly introduce” themselves and “say what you’re hoping to get out of this class.”

Even worse, the sloppy shortcut was for the “ethics and technology” course taught by Fritts.

“To their credit, they all acknowledged it,” she said to BI. “But it was just really surprising to me that what was supposed to be a kind of freebie in terms of assignments even that they felt compelled to generate with an LLM.”

Talk with GPT You

The students’ repetitive AI-generated replies were mere repetitions of what ethics classes typically cover, rather than being an honest reflection of what they really wanted to learn from the course.
“A lot of students who take philosophy classes, especially if they’re not majors, don’t really know what philosophy is,” she stated. “So I like to get an idea of what their expectations are so I can know how to respond to them.”

The usage of large language models (LLMs) in Fritts’ ethics class really surprised her.
“Apologists for LLMs in the classroom should be ashamed at this point,” she tweeted in a thread that went viral a month ago. “Peace of mind, this isn’t just a ‘problem-solving tool’ that students are using,” using it to forget how to talk.”

“Impossible to be pessimistic enough about it to be honest,” she added at the time.
To Fritts, using the tech in a philosophy class completely misses the point of a humanities degree.
“The goal is to create liberated minds liberated people and offloading the thinking onto a machine, by definition, doesn’t achieve that,” she told BI.

The hype surrounding AI has breached the borders of Silicon Valley and is starting to pervade the entire educational system. Proponents argue the tech creates more opportunities to learn, while critics remain deeply skeptical.
For students entering the educational system now, it’ll likely become a ubiquitous part of their learning experience.

“The new generations will not be experiencing this technology for the first time,” Fritts stated to BI. “They’ll have grown up with it.”
“I think we can expect a lot of changes in the really foundational aspects of human agency,” she continued, “and I’m not convinced those changes are going to be good.”