Educators at odds with use of ChatGPT technology

At El Camino College, educators and administrators have different thoughts on the topic, but all agree they can’t ignore the issue.

Initially hired as an English professor in 2016, Coordinator for the Reading and Writing Center Christopher Glover insists the best way to defend against software like ChatGPT is to incorporate it into lesson plans, not to ban it outright.

“Our job has never been to be police,” Glover said. “We’re here to help students become better writers and we’re going to do everything we can to give them the tools that they need to be able to write effectively on their own, maybe with using things like [ChatGPT] as a helping tool.”

AI as an educational tool

In Glover’s eyes, students can use ChatGPT as an artificial thought partner, something to throw ideas against, the same way they would with a classmate or professor to brainstorm or generate ideas.

“If what happens is a dialogue, even if it’s with something artificial, it can lead to a better understanding of that idea, [which]canthenbe communicated in the form of writing,” Glover said.

Glover has confidence the AI software available cannot replace human thought or interaction, citing an English department colleague who shared an article about ChatGPT and joked that their jobs would soon be obsolete. But Glover insists the software, in its current state, is not there yet.

“Until an AI is a substitute for those things, I think our jobs are safe,” Glover said. “But I think we need to be diligent and honest with ourselves about what it has the potential to do.”

English professor Christopher Page fed the software one of his assigned writing prompts in order to see the text responses it could generate.

Page described the results as “OK” but he wouldn’t call what the software produced as higher education-level writing. Instead, he thinks educators should lean into AI instead of running from it.

“It’s going to push us to focus more on revising our writing,” Page said. “[I think] it’s going to shift us to focus on the critical thinking aspect of reading and writing, the part that a machine can’t do, at least not yet.”

Page believes the software will usher in significant changes in education. Hoping instead of the initial negative “knee-jerk” reactions coming from colleges across the nation, Page thinks there is a benefit to focusing more on adaptation.

“What we don’t want to do is to make writing go backward, we don’t want to say writing has to now be all pen and paper,” Page said. “Our reaction should not be to turn students into suspects, that’s a horrible way to teach.”

Distance Education Faculty Coordinator Moses Wolfenstein, whose responsibilities include teaching faculty how to navigate the online Canvas system, views the emergence of artificial intelligence as a way to step up the assessment of students with a more unique approach.

Wolfenstein thinks the use of video for more assignments could help educators see “whether or not their students get it.”

“If you give a good assignment that’s got an interesting hook, your students are just more likely to do it anyway,” he said.

In the short term, Wolfenstein is not worried about the use of AI in the classroom and thinks faculty can adapt.

“The sky is not falling yet,” Wolfenstein said. “But ‘yet’ is the operative word. I am very concerned about what AI is going to look like in 10 years; if you look at where we were with AI 10 years ago, nobody anticipated [ChatGPT].”

Academic dishonesty

Vice President of Institutional Effectiveness for the Academic Senate Kevin Degnan understands the reasons why some educators are incorporating the software into their lessons. However, Degnan does not see a legitimate pathway for how to ethically use it within a classroom right now.

“Using an AI to fully write an essay is like getting somebody else to do it,” Degnan said. “It’s artificial intelligence rather than organic intelligence but either way it’s not the individual student’s [original thought].”

Also an English professor, Degnan is not sure he would be comfortable with one of his students using it even to help with the “backbone” of an essay but is always open to using new tools to help students succeed.

At the Reading and Writing Center, tutor Ginger Mallery disagrees with Glover that ChatGPT can be used as a tool to generate ideas rather than holding firm on the position that students will use it to write essays.

“It is 100 percent cheating,” Mallery said. “It is a free way to get a paper completely written for you.” the very least give them an overview… let’s make sure that folks have had an understanding of what’s out there and what the truths are.”

Tutor Elizabeth King agrees.

“I think it’s dishonest,” King said. “If you’re not creating your ideas on your own, you’re not doing the assignment, are you?

Brown has heard of certain people within the Los Angeles Unified School District calling for an outright ban on the AI software but does not think the board should ever dictate how professors teach at El Camino.

On Friday, Feb. 24, Wolfenstein hosted an online Zoom faculty roundtable as a free-form brainstorming session about what others believe the college should do with ChatGPT. Meant more as a conversation starter, and not a place for definitive policy change, the virtual discussion was attended by over 40 El Camino faculty members.

There is a fine line between inspiration and plagiarism… if you have a model set in front of you it’s hard to create original ideas.”

Preparing for the future President of the Board of Trustees Kenneth Brown recognizes the value of taking a step back before outright banning the software. He said the best thing El Camino and other institutions can do right now is to learn as much as they can.

“The campus community needs to understand that these tools are available for our students and our staff,” Brown said. “So maybe we can just at

“We’re not necessarily looking for answers yet, this is more of a listening session,” Wolfenstein said. “I certainly didn’t come with any answers.”

During the meeting, Wolfenstein admitted he had asked the software itself about some ways educators could “defeat it.” say that

Some of the solutions the software suggested included asking students to include draft work or assigning nontraditional coursework such as video responses instead of essays.

Wolfenstein said he is currently working with an Academic Integrity Committee student representative and the Associated Students Organization to organize a similar meeting for students to voice their own thoughts.

Thinkers throughout time have had their own thoughts about the evolutions in human innovation. Here are their thoughts:

Plato on written language

"They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from

Innovations in Intelligence

within themselves, but by means of external marks," Plato said.

Louise-Sebastien Mercier on the printing press

"The printing press is the most powerful engine of progress and public opinion is the force that will sweep despotism away," Mercier, an 18th century novelist said.

Bill Gates on computers

“The computer was born to solve problems that did not exist before,” Gates said.

Elon Musk on artificial intelligence everybody [in the world] is at the stage where we need to learn and talk about it, we need to hear from everybody,” Wolfeststein said. “It’s a big jump, it’s not ‘Data from Star Trek’ yet, but maybe one day.”

I’m increasingly inclined to think that there should be some regulatory oversight just to make sure that we don’t do something very foolish. I mean with artificial intelligence we’re summoning the demon," Musk said.

Writer's Note: The first two paragraphs were written by ChatGPT