Should AI be permitted in college classrooms? Four scholars weigh in.

How do you enforce it?

At the end of the day, if things like ChatGPT can produce papers which are hard to detect (especially with a high false positive), there's not much they can do.

Further, while I personally think AI has been waaaay overhyped, there's something to be said about learning to use the tech effectively, because everyone else sure as shit will. Now writing papers isn't something you do a lot outside of college in most fields, but knowing how to use GPT or something similar to help is a relevant skill, even if I think it's more risk/effort than it's worth.

Anyone who doesn't learn how to use any new technology will be stuck in the past. ChatGPT is an incredible tool if you learn it's strengths and weaknesses.

It's amazing as a descriptive and narrative tool, but it's not informative or a shortcut to research since it doesn't understand it's own output (ask it to cite sources and you'll see what I mean).

Learning how to explore a tool's limitations is a valuable skill for everyone, and if a teacher's questions can be answered by ChatGPT, they're asking the wrong questions (when it comes to higher education, at least).

Day-to-day usage of ChatGPT seems like it could be quite educational if improves students' bullshit detectors through practice. The output often looks superficially okay, so in order to do that, you need to read at a deeper level, understand things conceptually, and also learn from other sources about whatever's being discussed.

At least, that's how I see it working for coding, where you get a lot of feedback about whether the code you wrote worked. Not sure for other subjects.

It seems like educators should be able to harness this somehow? Also, school is the time to do it. For many subjects, that's where you practice things but it doesn't really matter.

In order for it to work, though, students need to care about learning the truth.