Walk into Park City High School, and it’s likely you’ll hear conversation swirling through the hallways about the new technology that’s taking education by storm: generative artificial intelligence.
Rising to popularity over the last six months, generative AI tools, such as ChatGPT, have entered schools, eliciting both excited and frightened reactions about the future of education.
These AI tools provide students with the ability to answer questions, create stories, debug code and brainstorm ideas all with the press of a few buttons. With so many possibilities now at students’ fingertips, parents and educators alike question what they should do to harness this new technology’s immense capabilities without sacrificing essential learning practices.
Park City High School Principal Roger Arbabi commented on the unprecedented rate at which generative AI is sweeping through schools across the nation.
“Things are happening at the speed of light,” he said. “To have a tool that’s been so recently released and to be so readily available is a shift we have not ever seen before.”
Park City School District Chief Information Officer Drew Frink likened generative AI’s rise in schools to that of the calculator.
“When they came into schools, there was quite a hubbub around,” he said.
People would say, “you’re never going to have a calculator in your pocket. You need to know how to do all of this by hand,” Frink said
“Of course, everyone now has a calculator in their pocket,” he continued. “This is likely that same level of disruption.”
Given the speed at which generative AI has begun transforming classroom learning, Park City High School is still figuring out if, and how, it will regulate AI use. Currently, the popular tool ChatGPT is blocked on students’ school devices; however, how the school district will treat AI in the coming school year remains to be seen.
“For me to think that I’m going to be controlling an open site like ChatGPT is not reasonable,” Arbabi said. “I think that what we as educators have to look at is, listen, writing is an important skill set that we need to have, so how are we going to be able to manage it so that students are authentically learning how to write?”
Part of the high school’s challenge is finding ways to harness generative AI’s revolutionary capabilities, while also minimizing its potential harms.
“I can see where some of (AI’s) efficiency comes in,” Frink said. “It could be really interesting, and it gets us thinking about what it is that we really want students to be able to do.”
Park City Senior Nick Johnstone is optimistic about AI’s future in classrooms.
“I feel that ChatGPT could definitely be a benefit to people in schools and students because it gives the ability for students to skip the first part of thinking of an idea and trying to get started,” he said. “It definitely has the advantage of taking away from the brainstorming stage and just being able to go into the writing.”
Johnstone said one experience that helped him realize generative AI’s potential benefits was working on an assignment from his English teacher, Julie Hooker. For the assignment, Hooker asked students to use ChatGPT to help conduct research. Johnstone, who was researching CRISPR, used ChatGPT to help formulate questions about his topic.
Johnstone also commented on generative AI’s potential consequences, though.
“There definitely can be some drawbacks with people using it for cheating,” he said. “Say you have a poem class, maybe you’re assigned to write a poem of a certain length about a certain topic. You could just put that template into the AI, and it’ll just write the poem for you.”
When he tried out ChatGPT’s poetry writing skills for himself, Johnstone said the technology could create “amazing poems about any topic that you told it to.” He added that, for other types of writing, “the artificial intelligence can write things very on par with what normal high school students could.”
Still, Johnstone maintained his belief that, overall, AI can and should be used to improve education, not hinder it.
“I hope, in the future, people learn to use this tech instead of trying to avoid it, like my English teacher,” he said.
For now, though, generative AI continues to transform education more and more each day.
“It’s exciting,” Frink said.” But we have to figure it out. That’s the hard work for us.”