Young Gen Zers are adopting OpenAI’s AI-powered chatbot, ChatGPT, for schoolwork, according to a new survey from the Pew Research Center. But it’s unclear whether they are fully aware of the technology’s pitfalls.
In a follow-up to its 2023 survey of ChatGPT use among youth, Pew asked approximately 1,400 adolescents aged 13 to 17 living in the United States whether they had used ChatGPT for homework or other school-related tasks. 26% said they had twice as many as two years ago.
Just over half of the teens who responded to the survey – 54% – said they found it acceptable to use ChatGPT to research new topics. 29% said the AI tool was acceptable for math problems, and 18% said using ChatGPT to write essays was acceptable.
Considering the ways in which ChatGPT can fall short, the results are probably cause for alarm.
ChatGPT isn’t great at math and isn’t the most reliable source of facts. A recent study investigating whether leading AI can pass a doctoral-level history test found that GPT-4o, the default AI model that powers ChatGPT, can answer questions only slightly more accurately than a person who guesses at random.
The same study found that ChatGPT is weaker in areas, such as social mobility and sub-Saharan African geopolitics, potentially relevant to the demographics of teenagers who report using it most in school. According to the Pew survey, black and Hispanic teens are more likely than white teens to say they have used ChatGPT for school-related work.
Not surprisingly, research on the pedagogical impact of ChatGPT is mixed. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania found that Turkish high school students with access to ChatGPT performed worse on a math test than students who did not have access. In a separate study, researchers observed that German students who used ChatGPT were able to find research materials more easily but tended to synthesize them with less skill than their peers who did not use ChatGPT.
In a separate survey conducted last year by Pew, a quarter of public K-12 teachers said the use of AI tools like ChatGPT in education does more harm than good. A survey conducted by the Rand Corporation and the Center on Reinventing Public Education, meanwhile, found that only 18% of K-12 teachers use artificial intelligence in their classrooms.
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