ChatGPT or CheatGPT?

According to a recent survey by the Pew Research Center, the amount of teenagers who confessed to using ChatGPT as a tool for homework assistance has more than doubled in the past year.

The research team conducted a study involving adolescents aged 13 to 17 and discovered that as time goes by, students are becoming more accustomed and at ease with both the technology and their interaction with it.

According to the survey, about 26% of teens used the AI chatbot to help them complete their schoolwork in 2024 — up from 13% in 2023.

The majority (73%) of adolescents still said they don’t use the technology to complete their assignments.

But attitudes are shifting.

One of the most striking changes from last year is the increased use of ChatGPT by black and hispanic teens for school-related tasks.

In 2023, 13% of black and 11% of hispanic teens reported using the chatbot for academic purposes. However, by 2024, that number surged to 31%.

On the other hand, Caucasian teenagers are still less inclined to seek help from ChatGPT for their academic tasks, as only 22% acknowledged utilizing it in 2024, although this percentage indicates a slight increase from the previous year.

Along with black and hispanic students, older teens are also embracing technology to upgrade their homework help.

Interestingly, there was no significant difference in ChatGPT usage based on gender or household income.

“It’s out there,” Pengcheng Shi, an associate dean in the Department of Computing and Information Sciences at Rochester Institute of Technology, previously told The Post.

“You cannot stop people from using it, so now the question becomes, how to best use it,” he added.

How do teens think the technology can appropriately be used?

Overall, teens’ acceptance of its role varied depending on the task input into the chat.

Most teens (54%) agreed it’s acceptable to use ChatGPT for researching new topics — only 9% disagreed.

However, they were much less supportive of using the technology to complete more in-depth tasks or finish assignments.

Teens were divided on their views of using ChatGPT to solve math problems (29% say it’s acceptable and 28% say it’s not) and mostly agreed it’s wrong to rely on the program to type up an essay (18% say it’s alright but 42% say it’s unacceptable).

“I think the pressure here is less on students, and much more on faculty to really find a way to incorporate new technologies,” Jamie Cohen, an assistant professor of media studies at CUNY Queens College, previously told The Post.

“You have to explain how these systems work, what the data sets are, why the data sets are flawed and why this isn’t an acceptable way of handing in a paper,” Cohen said.

Students who are familiar with ChatGPT are more likely to use it for schoolwork and consider it acceptable — about 56% of those who’ve heard “a lot” about ChatGPT use it for their schoolwork, compared to just 18% of teens who have only heard “a little” about it.

These mixed opinions reflect the ongoing debate around the ethics of using AI tools — the conversation updates along with the technology.