Younger Gen Zers are embracing OpenAI’s AI-powered chatbot, ChatGPT, for schoolwork, according to in a new Pew Research Center survey. But it’s not clear they’re fully aware of the technology’s pitfalls.
In a follow-up to the 2023 survey on ChatGPT usage among youth, Pew asked ~1,400 US-based 13- to 17-year-olds if they have used ChatGPT for homework or other school-related tasks . Twenty-six percent said they had, double the number two years ago.
Just over half of the teens who responded to the poll — 54% — said they think it’s acceptable to use ChatGPT to research new topics. 29% said the AI tool was acceptable for math problems and 18% said using ChatGPT for essay writing was acceptable.
Considering the ways in which ChatGPT can fail, the results are probably cause for alarm.
ChatGPT isn’t that great at math — and it isn’t most reliable source of the facts. A recent one study investigating whether top AI can pass a Ph.D.-level historical test found that GPT-4o, the default AI model powering ChatGPT, could answer questions slightly more accurately than a person guessing at random.
The same study found that ChatGPT is weaker in areas such as social mobility and the geopolitics of sub-Saharan Africa, potentially related to the demographics of teenagers who report using it more in school. According to the Pew poll, black and Hispanic teens are more likely than white teens to say they’ve used ChatGPT for school-related work.
Research is unsurprisingly mixed on the pedagogical impact of ChatGPT. University of Pennsylvania researchers I establish that Turkish high school students with access to ChatGPT did worse on a math test than students without access. In separate studythe researchers observed that German students who used ChatGPT could find research materials more easily, but they tended to compose those materials less skillfully than their peers who did not use ChatGPT.
In separate voting last year by Pew, a quarter of K-12 public teachers said that using AI tools like ChatGPT in education is doing more harm than good. A overview by the Rand Corporation and the Center on Reinventing Public Education, meanwhile, found that just 18% of K-12 educators use AI in their classrooms.
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