From being the star of horror movies to functioning as a fun web game, AI has been around for a while. With the first AI being created during the 1956 Dartmouth workshop, it has come a long way since and is now in the public eye more than ever before. One of the main reasons behind this is OpenAI and their creation of the most advanced generative AI technology ever to be open to the public, ChatGPT.

ChatGPT began its production in 2018 when Ilya Sutskever and the other scientists at OpenAI began diligently working on the program that allows ChatGPT to function. The final product was released on November 30, 2022. ChatGPT could answer almost any question thrown at it with human-like responses, but robotic-like accuracy. That isn’t the end of ChatGPT’s abilities, however, as it could also generate almost any sort of prompt that involves writing, notably essays, projects, and news articles. The limitless capabilities of Chat-GPT, along with other OpenAI projects such as DALL-E, begs the question, where is the limit? This is also the question on the minds of teachers and school faculty alike.

Since the introduction of ChatGPT, students quickly realized they could use it in academically dishonest ways, such as by writing their essays for them in English. This isn’t the first time an AI has been used in order to cheat in schools, however, with the app popular with students in math class, PhotoMath. PhotoMath could be used by simply taking a picture of a math problem and waiting for the app to pop out the answer.

All this leads to the simple question of, whether AI should be used in schools. That is the question I want to research through a series of articles spanning multiple teachers of each school subject and their thoughts on AI being used by students and if they believe that it is either a resourceful tool for research and brainstorming or if it is simply too much of a risk to entrust students with that much power. Stay tuned as I continue to update this series so you can form your own opinion on the risks and rewards of artificial intelligence.