Most education technologies are invited into school. Generative AI crashed the party.
In late November of 2022, ChatGPT was released to the public as a free research preview. Students quickly realized ChatGPT was pretty good at doing their homework for them. Schools scrambled to figure out what to do: Ban it? Embrace it? Teachers and students found themselves adapting to a new reality.
Buckle Up, Here it Comes kicks off “The Homework Machine” a mini series in the Teachlab podcast. Hosts Jesse Dukes and Justin Reich share stories of teachers and students reacting to the arrival of an exciting, alarming, and strange new technology.
Producer: Jesse Dukes
Editors: Ruxandra Guidi and Alexandra Salomon.
Reporting and research: Holly McDede, Natasha Esteves, Andrew Meriwether, and Chris Bagg.
Sound design and music supervision: Steven Jackson.
Data analysis: Manee Ngozi Nnamani and Manasa Kudumu.
Special thanks to Josh Sheldon, Camila Lee, Liz Hutner, and Eric Klopfer.
Administrative support from Jessica Rondon.
The research and reporting you heard in this episode was supported by the Spencer Foundation, the Kapor Foundation, the Jameel World Education Lab, the Social and Ethical Responsibility of Computing initiative at MIT, and the RAISE initiative, Responsible AI for Social Empowerment and Education also at MIT.
Additional support from Google’s Academic Research Awards program.
InTandem facilitated some of our student interviews.
Full episode transcript.
Teachlab Presents: The Homework Machine
Episode 1: Buckle Up, Here it Comes
Justin Reich: This is the Teachlab podcast, I’m Justin Reich.
Jesse Dukes: And I’m Jesse Dukes.
Justin Reich: Devon O’Neil is a high school social studies teacher in Oregon. Back in 2021, after six years of teaching, she took 2 years off while her husband attended grad school. At MIT actually. And during her break from teaching, she worked designing classroom curriculum.
Devon O’Neil: Which is a super cool experience, very different from being in the classroom, and also really reinforced that I wanted to be in the classroom.
Jesse Dukes: When she was on her break, O’Neil missed two momentous years for schools. There was a pandemic, remote learning, hybrid learning, returning to school buildings. And when she went back to the classroom, in the fall of 2023, she said, there was some culture shock.
Devon O’Neil: It was those two, like super crazy post-Covid years. So I come back, and it’s like, like those movies where the caveman, like defrost or whatever. And they’re like “what is this?”
Justin Reich: It wasn’t just that her fellow teachers were harrowed and burned out, while she was fresh and energetic. She also noticed that the student work was, well, different from what she remembered.
Devon O’Neil: I’d have these really well written paragraphs or snippets that are looked to be very well researched and all this, but not at all on topic. Grammar was off. Even the most brilliant 14-year-old still talks like a 14-year-old and still writes like a 14-year-old.
Jesse Dukes: So, the grammar was oddly good. O'Neil can see her students' screens, and she sometimes watches them work. And, one day, she noticed they were using an unusual search engine.
Devon O’Neil: Bing! I was noticing a lot of them were using Bing. To Google stuff, see even to Google stuff. And I was like, that’s the weirdest choice. Who uses Bing?
Justin Reich: And then, one day, she was watching a student complete a writing assignment in a google doc. And poof, a whole well-written paragraph just appeared. Out of nowhere.
Devon O’Neil: Like one minute it’s not there, and one minute it’s there. And, it said like “here are your results”. And they forgot to delete that.
Jesse Dukes: And that’s when Devon realized her students were using ChatGPT to complete in class writing assignments. They would copy and paste the questions she would give them into Bing’s Copilot, which was a free way to use ChatGPT. Then, the students copied the answer, sometimes without any editing, right into their google document.
Devon O’Neil: Which is kind of a rookie mistake, like if they’re going to cheat, you want them to cheat a little better.
Justin Reich: We first talked to Devon in 2023, just a few weeks after she figured out what was going on. She says that since then, she’s gotten a lot more savvy about ChatGPT. But her experience speaks to how much can, and did, change in schools, in just a couple of years.
Jesse Dukes: In November of 2022, ChatGPT was launched as a free research preview of advanced generative AI, like a pilot, or beta version. Generative AI is a type of artificial intelligence that can create new content, especially text, but also images, videos, and music.
ChatGPT is the most famous example of generative AI. There are competitors like Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, and the Chinese company, DeepSeek. And rather quickly, students figured out, ChatGPT was pretty good at doing their homework for them. Devon, out of school for two years, working on curriculum, had missed the arrival of the new homework machine. But her students had not.
Justin Reich: The arrival of chatGPT, and then fairly quick upgrades with GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 within a couple of years, has been the big story in education technology since the fall of 2022.
[Waterfall of news stories]
News anchor 1: So how does it work? Students can drop an assignment into something like ChatGPT, click a button and their homework is done.
News anchor 2: She is talking about ChatGPT. School districts like New York cities are banning it.
News anchor 3: ChatGPT is the new artificial intelligence tool causing a stir.
Jesse Dukes: Schools have scrambled to figure out what to do about ChatGPT. Ban it? Embrace it? Teachers have scrambled to try to get ahead of the “cheating” problem, and to find ways in which AI can support education. Some Students have scrambled to figure out how to use AI without their teachers detecting it. And education technology companies have scrambled to create AI powered ed tech. And have made many promises about how generative AI will transform education.
Sal Khan: But I think we're at the cusp of using AI for probably the biggest positive transformation that education has ever seen, and the way we're going to do that is by giving every student on the planet an artificially intelligent but amazing personal tutor.
Justin Reich: My career has been devoted to studying education technology. Over and over again, we’ve seen new technologies emerge in education, and the technology developers will promise, every time, that the new tech will transform and democratize education.
Sal Khan :That's what's about to happen.
Justin Reich: And while the technologies do sometimes help teachers and students, those big transformations to schools, they never happen.
Jesse Dukes: But there is something different about Chat GPT and other AI. Throughout history, most education technology has been adopted by schools, who hope it will help them do better work, teaching students. But Generative AI wasn’t invited into schools. Nott for the most part. It crashed the party. Even if schools ban it from school laptops, students can often get around that ban, by using Bing, for example. Or they have their own laptop. Or they can access it on their mobile phone, which over 95% of teenagers have.
So, the kids have access to generative AI. And they’re using it, whether their teachers want them to, or not. That’s having a big impact on schools.
Now, a little about me, and this project. I am a journalist, and for the past year and a half, I’ve been working with Justin and other colleagues at MIT’s Teaching Systems Lab. We’ve interviewed over 85 teachers and school leaders, and over 35 students about how all of this is actually playing out in schools.
I’ve been hearing about why students cheat using AI, what teachers are doing to stop them, and how some teachers and students have found ChatGPT to be helpful for learning. And for the next several weeks, we’re going to share what we’ve learned with you in a mini series we’re calling the Homework Machine.
Justin Reich: And now, Jesse, who has immersed himself in this research, will be our host and guide for these episodes. Jesse, you can take it from here.
Jesse Dukes: Thanks Justin, but not so fast. We’re going to want your historical knowledge about educational technology to help us unpack and contextualize these stories. So stay close, and keep your mic handy. In fact, we’re going to hear from you again in this episode.
Justin Reich: Sounds good.
Jesse Dukes: Alright, well, let’s go back to A beginning: December of 2022. We’ll start with Steve Ouellette. He’s a technology director at the Westwood School district, southwest of Boston. His job includes keeping track of computers and software for the district, but also helping teachers think through how to use technology in their work. He remembers the exact moment he heard about generative AI.
Steve Ouellette: So I think it was, it was December 8th. And I was home sick with Covid. I got an email, I'm on a listserv, you know, with all the tech directors in Massachusetts and I got an email that said: Have AI write your next English paper. The sub caption was: Buckle up, here it comes. And someone had basically shared a video of this thing called ChatGPT, that was generating an essay about, I think it was about Raisin in the Sun. And I was like “What is going on here?”
Jesse Dukes: Watching the video, Ouellette says he immediately realized that this was a big deal.
Steve Ouellette: Yeah, that was, that was a moment. You know, I've been in this business since 1993 and I don't remember having like, a really specific, like, reaction to something the way I did when I saw that.
Jesse Dukes: Ouellette emailed the district’s superintendent, and explained the situation to her. There was a new technological tool, available to students, that could do their schoolwork. Pretty effectively.
Steve Ouellette: And she had no idea what it was. And I explained to her what it was and sent her a link and she shot back to me five minutes later and she's like, yeah, we need to write about this. And so we, we felt, we both felt this sense of like, urgency.
Jesse Dukes: The superintendent asked Ouellette to write a memo to the district's teachers. Ouellette is a technology guy, and out of curiosity and excitement, he decided to experiment. Could ChatGPT draft the memo? He asked ChatGPT to write the first draft and sent it to the superintendent. She read it and told Ouellette, this is pretty formal language, it doesn’t sound like you. Make it more casual sounding. But Ouellette didn’t rewrite the memo himself. He prompted ChatGPT to revise the memo. And he told it: “Make it more conversational.”
Steve Ouellette: I said, you need to write something funny about how, you know France was gonna win the World Cup. And it like, seamlessly incorporated a little like parenthetical thing about, oh by the way, France is gonna win the World Cup. And in the way it did, it was like magnificent.
Jesse Dukes: Here’s the memo ChatGPT wrote:
ChatGPT: ChatGPT could also be used to help students learn other languages, such as Spanish or French (which, by the way, I think will win the 2022 World Cup). Imagine being able to have a conversation with ChatGPT in French and receiving instant corrections and feedback on your pronunciation and grammar. The possibilities are truly endless.
Jesse Dukes: Side note, I’m not that impressed with how ChatGPT did with that World Cup joke. It says that “French” will win the world cup, not “France”. But, that aside, they sent the memo out that Monday. Remember, this was December of 2022.
Over the next few months, Ouellette formed an AI working group in the district. They brought in a guest speaker. They looked at academic policies. They talked to teachers and students. And by the summer of 2023, they had revised academic integrity guidelines as well as some basic training for teachers.
Steve Ouellette: The goal was to inform staff about what this stuff is, to let them know that there are guidelines, and that if they have students, you know, in grades eight or higher, they can use it with their students. But we also wanted to inform staff how to use it for themselves to make their own work more efficient. The theory behind that is if they're using it, then they'll be more informed to use it responsibly with their kids. And it's nowhere near where what it needs to be. I'll be the first to admit it, but we did something.
Jesse Dukes: What Westwood did was quite a bit more than most districts. Last fall, a survey found only about one quarter of teachers said their school district had provided any guidance or professional development, about AI. That’s two years after the arrival of the technology.
At Westwood, the faculty learned about ChatGPT pretty early on. Likely before many of their students heard about it. That was NOT true for other schools.
Nanki Kaur: The First Time I heard about ChatGPT was in my English Class.
Jesse Dukes: This is Nanki Kaur. She just graduated from American High School, in Fremont, California. And she heard about ChatGPT from another student back in the spring of 2023.
Nanki Kaur: We were having a conversation about how we were going to approach our research paper assignment that was coming up, and you would have to pick an individual of American significance and prove why they were of American significance and what impact they had. And he was talking about how he just asked this AI platform about how his person of American Significance who was BLEEP, had an impact on America and he got a really strong thesis statement. And he said, I didn't even have to do anything.
Jesse Dukes: Now, I bleeped that last bit so this student won’t get in trouble.But the point here, Nanki says the thesis statement was actually pretty good.
Nanki Kaur: And we were all confused and we were like, what are you talking about? Like how did you not have to do anything and how do you have such a strong thesis statement? 'cause we were just learning how to write a thesis statement at that time. And he said, there's this online platform, it's driven by artificial intelligence and it just writes it for you and it's, it's really thorough.It's really good. You guys should try it. And so that was the first time I heard about it and I was shocked.
Jesse Dukes: Nanki talked with our colleague Holly McDede, a reporter based in California.
Holly McDede: Did you try it?
Nanki Kaur: I did go home and try it. Not for the same assignment, but I went home and I looked it up like Chat GPT, OpenAI, what is it? And then I asked it a couple questions like what is the weather like, and if I were to write a story about a certain situation,could you write me a story? And it actually answered all my prompts and it wrote me like a solid paragraph, and so I was shocked. Yeah.
Jesse Dukes: Nanki says she doesn’t know what the other student did with his thesis statement, but she has a guess:
Nanki Kaur: I think he did turn it in and I don't know what kind of disciplinary action he got because there wasn't really much set in stone.
Holly McDede: Do you suspect he didn’t get any disciplinary action?
Nanki Kaur: I do suspect that because he was oddly smug about how well he had done on that assignment.
Jesse Dukes: As far as Nanki knows, that student didn’t get in any trouble. In fact, she’s not sure the teachers knew about ChatGPT at that point. And Nanki says that the school didn’t seem to catch on that students were using ChatGPT to cheat until the fall of 2023, the next school year. A whole year after ChatGPT launched.
But Nanki says when they did realize what was happening, the school came down hard. Nanki’s AP English teacher held a special class meeting to present the new academic integrity policy, with a list of sanctions if students were caught using Chat GPT or other AI.
Nanki Kaur: Which included, zeros on the assignments or administrative disciplinary action. And if worse comes to worst, then it would be, suspensions.
Jesse Dukes: At American High School Nanki says their policies didn’t just ban ChatGPT. Students were also told they couldn’t use Grammarly, the grammar check program, or similar AI tools that are often built into students' browsers. But, the policies weren’t applied consistently. Nanki says her social studies teacher actually encouraged her to use AI for research.
Nanki Kaur: Because she said, I think it's a really good tool to get all the facts in one spot. Obviously, I'm gonna ask you guys to fact check and cross check, make sure that everything is correct. But I think it's a really great, you know, tool for you guys to use so that you have everything in one place.
Holly McDede: Was that confusing for you or other students?
Nanki Kaur: It was confusing for me, personally because I was like, I just don't want to use it at all. Like I don't even care because I don't need like this habit. I don't want it on my computer. I don't want it anywhere, like I just want it like away from me because I didn't want to jeopardize any chance of having a good grade in that class or in any of my classes.
Jesse Dukes: Some 3000 miles away from Nanki, another student had quite a different experience. Woody Goss was wrapping up 8th grade in a public school in the suburbs north of New York city when he spoke to us in the spring of 2024. He says his teachers didn’t really respond to the arrival of ChatGPT. And, that students used AI to get their schoolwork done in almost all of his classes.
He says his science class was the worst. The students all have laptops, but the teacher sits in front of the class, and can’t see what’s on the screens. Woody sits in the back.
Woody Goss: And you can see everybody's screen and you can see ChatGPT spitting out the text, and you can see them copy and pasting it into their paper.
Jesse Dukes: You could literally see your fellow students using ChatGPT…
Woody Goss: And copying and pasting it, yup.
Jesse Dukes: If you could estimate how many people in a classroom of 20 students, how many were using it to cheat in the way you’re describing. How many would you say?
Woody Goss: So I'd say that there's 10 people in that class using it for everything like cheating on, the whole paper is AI, I'd say there's another 5 that probably half of it's written by AI, but they do actually read it through and go, “Gee, maybe I don't wanna include the part that says ‘As a large language model…’” but they like read it through and copy parts and splice bits and do whatever. Then I'd say of, so you've got five remaining. I'd say probably 4 of that 5 do the paper legitimately. So there's 4 people doing it legitimately, and then there's another one that's going, and I don't know, they, it's kind of a mix, like they plagiarized stuff, but it's like a paragraph in their entire thing.
And I would say, of those 4, I mean, unless you've got a really, not a super smart tech kid, I'd say probably all four of those are using AI in some way. It's just using it appropriately.
Jesse Dukes: Woody says that some of his teachers were apparently totally oblivious to generative AI. But not his science teacher. She tried to encourage students to use it in a way that would help them learn.
Woody Goss: That teacher was really trying, she seemed to grasp the concept that there was AI being used, and she was like, we're gonna learn how to use AI, legitimately and like how do we use it in our research? And everybody heard, oh, you can use AI in your paper. And they all didn't actually listen to what she was saying. Please use it as like a secondary source. And they all went, “okay, I'm gonna use ChatGPT to write my paper. “
Jesse Dukes: Um, do you have any teachers who effectively managed this? You know, either in their…
Woody Goss: No, I have the science teacher really tried. She really, she did actually provide, unlike all the other teachers, she actually provided instruction like, Hey, here's how we're gonna use it. Everybody ignored it, but she did try, right? All my other teachers just flat out ignored it the whole year. Um, except for the ELA teacher who said, we're all writing paper benchmarks, which was a nightmare. That was just…
Jesse Dukes: Why, why was that a nightmare?
Woody Goss: Because I'd say for a lot of us, not, not even including AI, we're all digital people on Chromebooks. We don't, we don't know how to write a paper benchmark, which you could argue is its own problem. But then you had a million kids yelling and screaming about that, because god forbid you have to write a paper benchmark. Eww.
Jesse Dukes: So, according to Woody, his English teacher made the students write things out by hand, which actually did keep people from using ChatGPT. Although Woody thinks that created other problems.
Some people have suggested that Woody doesn’t need to worry. According to him he’s doing his work legitimately. Assuming that’s true, and that the other students are using ChatGPT, then it’ll all come out in the wash. He’ll actually learn what he’s supposed to, and the others won’t, and eventually, that will be obvious, and give him an advantage. Maybe in getting into college, maybe on tests, maybe in life.
But Woody doesn’t see it that way. In his world. Grades matter. Students are under pressure. When students choose to cheat, that can impact how the teachers teach the material. And the pace of learning, which puts even more pressure on the students who are trying to do the work themselves.
Woody Goss: I mean, it’s frustrating. It's a compounding effect. I'd say at the beginning of the year, there weren't a lot of students using AI, and I'd say it's shifted as the pacing gets faster, then more kids feel like they need it 'cause they feel like they're gonna fail if they don't have it. So it piles on itself, and it also, I was never the fast worker in the class. I can do the work, but I'm like dyslexic anyway, so it takes me forever to do the work anyway. I’d say the number of people not using it, like the number of people holding out and being like, “I'm gonna do my work legitimately” is going down because it's just, there's no room for, especially in the district where I am, where a lot of, we're very grade grubby.
It's expected, like you gotta have an A in every class. So everybody is, “I gotta get that A, I gotta get this assignment in on time.”
Jesse Dukes: All right. I’d like to bring Justin Reich back to the program. Justin has studied technology in schools over the decades, and he can help us make sense of the stories we just heard. Welcome back Justin.
Justin Reich: Thanks for having me, Jesse.
Jesse Dukes: So the interviews that I shared took place over a year ago, and we’re now coming up on 3 years since ChatGPT was unveiled in November of 2022. So I’m curious what overall reactions you’re having as you listen back to these stories.
Justin Reich: Well, the first thing it makes me think of is something that we've talked about before, which is just this idea of instantaneous arrival is so unusual for an education technology. I mean, the joke we make sometimes is that, you know, “no kid ever dragged their own smart board into a classroom”. Typically education technology was purchased by schools, and that meant the schools could have at least something of a plan before they gave all their teachers online grade books, or they bought all their kids' Chromebooks, or they bought all their kids' iPads, or whatever else it is. But there is zero time for planning. There's zero time for preparation. You know, Steve Ouellette says, “This is urgent”.
There's just, there's something which is happening right now and we need to deal with it. And then schools have really different capacities to deal with that. So an affluent place like Westwood, where they probably have recovered pretty well from the pandemic where things are feeling like they're back on track, they probably have plenty of resources to hire substitute teachers, you know, the population of kids they serve have all kinds of challenges, but not nearly, the challenges they might encounter in some of their urban neighborhoods nearby or rural neighborhoods out west. They're in a good place to be able to say, “Oh, we've, I've got some extra time to be able to manage this. Like, let's get started.” Let's, you know, teachers have extra time to be on the working group, “Let's get started working on this.”
For, at other places, many, many schools in November 2022, in the spring of 2023, were still drowning in the challenges of chronic absenteeism of learning, loss of school that felt like it really hadn't bounced back yet. And so this new thing shows up, and not every school in the country is on the same footing in figuring out how to deal with it. But of course, even if a school doesn't have an institutional plan to deal with it, every teacher has to deal with it.
So Ms O'Neill walks into her classroom and all of her students are using Bing. And she goes, well, you know, Bing! Bing is the web browser that you use to download Google Chrome, so you can never have to use Bing again. Why are all my students using Bing on a Chromebook? Like none of this makes sense. And what a great story, to remind us how significantly and quickly things changed and how there was no choice to postpone this. There was no way to say, ah, “ we'll just buy, maybe we'll buy the smart boards, but we'll buy them next year, or we'll buy them two years after that. Let's just work on other stuff for now.” You, as an educator, had this in your classroom and had to decide what you were gonna do.
Jesse Dukes: Well, speaking of no option to postpone, I wanna play you something that Sam Altman said about all of this back in 2023. You know that Sam Altman was one of the founders of OpenAI, the company responsible for ChatGPT. And he’s the CEO. You may remember he was actually ousted from the company briefly and then reinstated in an episode they're now calling the blip, and one thing he's gotten some criticism for is just releasing new versions of ChatGPT out into the world, arguably without a lot of thought about what impact that might have or without a lot of support for institutions like schools that might be impacted by AI. And in 2023, the hosts of the New York Times podcast, Hard Fork asked him about that. And here's what he said.
Sam Altman: You know, one example that I mean is instructive because it was the first and the loudest is what happened with ChatGPT and education. Days, at least weeks. But I think days after the release of ChatGPT school districts were like falling all over themselves to ban ChatGPT. And that didn't really surprise us, like that we could have predicted and did predict.
The thing that happened after that quickly was, you know, like weeks to months, was school districts and teachers saying, Hey, actually we made a mistake and this is really important part of the future of education and the benefits far outweigh the downside. And not only are we banning it, we’re encouraging our teachers to make use of it in the classroom. We're encouraging our students to get really good at this tool because it's gonna be part of the way people live.
And, you know, then there was like a big discussion about what, what the kind of path forward should be. And that is just not something that could have happened without releasing.
Jesse Dukes: So Justin, you were paying pretty close attention in 2022 and 2023 when ChatGPT was first unleashed upon schools. Do you think Altman's account is historically accurate?
Justin Reich: Well, I actually got to hear Sam Altman give some version of this because he came to MIT, not long after November, 2022, gave a talk that was facilitated by Sally Kornbluth, our president. And he said something along the lines, I think the question was something like, you know, where are there big wins for ChatGPT? And he was like, well, education's a slam dunk. This is a place where very obviously, we're seeing benefits, not really seeing any downsides. Things are just immediately improving society. So this is gonna be a fast win for us. And yeah, you know, it's, it's delusional.
It's not at all connected to what is actually happening in reality in schools. I'm sure some of it is, if I built a technology product, I'd be pretty excited to hear the voices of people who are happy with it. You know, people in powerful places don't always have great sources of information about what happens.
Jesse Dukes : And,and everything he says has a kind of factual basis to it, but it adds up to a kind of orderly picture of what happens, that to me doesn't really reflect the chaos that educators were experiencing.
Justin Reich: Also, if you just know something about schools, this idea that, like, “as soon as it was released they were all doing something”, it's like, no, that's not how schools work. And then “really quickly after doing it, they reverse themselves” and you're like, no, you do not under- like, schools are carrier fleets.
Jesse Dukes: Schools are super tankers.
Justin Reich: Schools are super tankers. Like when they turn, they turn slowly and they turn with inertia. And when they go back it takes a lot of time to move that backwards, but even just in the handful of stories that we heard,we heard from a couple of students, one teacher who said there was nothing happening in their schools. It wasn't being banned, it wasn't being encouraged. Teachers were kind of figuring out on their own what to do with it.
And I mean, if you talk to teachers and students, it's not very hard to get stories where you get the sense of like, oh, this is not an unambiguously good thing. Like this is making Nanki nervous because pretty clearly students are using this to bypass their learning in ways that they shouldn't. Woody is really concerned that his classes are moving faster than they're supposed to because teachers are getting the wrong feedback. From students because students, instead of doing the work and doing the learning and figuring things out, are just copying, pasting questions from ChatGPT into their assignments and this, and Woody is trying to, is telling us he's trying to do the right thing and this isn't working here.
And even Steve, who's in like the best possible circumstances, a really experienced, really talented tech director with a really supportive superintendent, really supportive community, cool things happening in their schools. As much good work as he's doing, I think he still feels like, that he's just barely taking the first steps that might be needed to get his hands wrapped around this thing.
Jesse Dukes: Yeah, and in fact, I actually played that Sam Altman tape for him and you know, he, and arguably what Sam Altman describes most closely resembles Westwood and Steve Ouellette, like of all the people we heard from, his story is the closest to Sam Altman's account of what happened. But this, this is what he had to say.
Steve Ouellette: Not to highlight Westwood, but when I talk to my peers in neighboring districts, no one's doing anything. Like they're just starting to create, think about creating guidelines. And so, we're kind of just like building the plane, you know, while we fly it.
Jesse Dukes: For the next 6 episodes, we’re going to hear stories of building the plane as we fly it. We’ll hear from the teachers who are struggling to prevent their students from using ChatGPT to bypass learning and thinking; We’ll talk with students about why they turn to AI to get their work done, and what it feels like to be falsely accused of using AI.
And we’ll hear from teachers, students, and school leaders who have found ways to use AI to help them teach or learn.
And in our next episode, what even is generative AI? And why does the so-called “jagged frontier” of this technology make it so challenging when it shows up in schools?
It doesn't think, it doesn't understand, it predicts one word at a time.
Jesse Dukes: That’s next time on the Homework Machine.
This episode was produced by me, Jesse Dukes. We had editing from Ruxandra Guidi and Alexandra Salomon. Reporting and research from Holly McDede, Natasha Esteves, Andrew Meriwether, and Chris Bagg. Sound design and music supervision by Steven Jackson. Production support from Yebu Ji. Data analysis from Manee Ngozi Nnamani and Manasa Kudumu. Special thanks to Josh Sheldon, Camila Lee, Liz Hutner, and Eric Klopfer. Administrative support from Jessica Rondon.
The research and reporting you heard in this episode was supported by the Spencer Foundation, the Kapor Foundation, the Jameel World Education Lab, the Social and Ethical Responsibility of Computing Initiative at MIT, and the RAISE initiative, Responsible AI for Social Empowerment and Education also at MIT.
And, we had support from Google’s Academic Research Awards program.
The Homework Machine is a production of the Teaching Systems Lab, Justin Reich Director, the lab is located at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, more commonly known to the world as MIT.