English teachers at Anderson High School have noticed a significant decrease in original writing and an increase in AI/ChatGPT submissions. Students use these AI programs as a shortcut, a way to turn in an essay without having to do any of the work.
One such teacher is Brittany Sylvia, who teaches both honors English for sophomores and dual credit composition, a class that counts for both high school and college credits, for juniors and seniors. Sylvia has been teaching dual credit for over four years, and part of the class is learning how to ethically use AI. AHS Student News sat down with Sylvia to ask her about AI usage in her classroom.
There are multiple different reasons for using AI to an advantage. Sylvia believes that students are being challenged in ways they haven’t experienced. “Smart kids have too much pressure on them,” said Sylvia. “They’re being asked to do things and to think in a way that they haven’t been pushed previously… and the pressure to perform and get good grades overwhelms that, and there’s this tool that will do it for them.”
However, the use of AI does not necessarily benefit the students. “If they don’t know what they’re looking for, then they’re still getting bad grades, even on the AI,” said Sylvia. “Because they don’t know how to do the writing, so they don’t recognize when the AI does it wrong.”
This increase in AI usage has directly affected Sylvia’s motivation to teach students how to write. “Nobody wants to learn how to write an essay,” said Sylvia. “They want to learn how to get a good grade and pass college and do the thing they want to do. So it makes it very frustrating because I feel like I’m just talking to brick walls who are then going to cheat.”
ChatGPT has become a very frequent issue in English classes, and as it becomes more and more humane in writing, AI detectors will have a more difficult time spotting the difference between human and robotic writing. It is up to the students to decide whether or not they want to use the AI as a tool to use it to cheat, but one thing is for certain: the world needs to be prepared for more writing done by AI.
