Eric Vanoncini said to the worried teachers in the room as reams of text generated by the ChatGPT bot unfolded on the big screen behind him, “It is dizzying.”

“It runs the risk of upending the educational landscape as we know it.”

In response to urgent requests for advice on how to deal with the new know-it-all bot, the high school English and philosophy teacher had collected dozens of educators for one of several workshops that had been quickly organised in the Swiss canton of Geneva.

The November release of ChatGPT, which utilises artificial intelligence to successfully replicate human writing, has raised worries about an impending cheating epidemic in schools all around the world.

Silvia Antonuccio, an instructor of Italian and Spanish, told AFP after the course that “it is frightening.”

“I don’t feel at all capable of telling a text produced by ChatGPT from one written by a human.”

The programme developed by California-based OpenAI was trained using terabytes of online data and billions of words, which allowed it to produce documents that are shockingly human-like, including passable school essays.

There are many stories of bots doing well in various fields, including recently passing a US law school exam.

Standing in a dark, crowded classroom, Vanoncini showed a tool and asked ChatGPT to write an introduction about himself… About ChatGPT.

The result, which appeared on the screen within seconds, was concise, well-written text “without spelling errors,” he notes, conceding:

“It’s pretty great.”

Of course, students are already aware of their potential.

Vanoncini recalled how his colleagues were disheartened when they realized that their normally mediocre class suddenly excelled in their assignments was not due to his enthusiastic encouragement. “But what can we do?” asked one of the teachers present angrily.

Vanoncini acknowledged the complexity of the issue and dismissed suggestions that programs being developed to detect the use of ChatGPT and other AI tools would solve the problem.

“Most experts agree that no tool is 100% effective.”

“It’s a bit like the Tour de France,” he said, noting that anti-doping authorities are developing tools to detect drug use and cyclists are quickly finding ways to circumvent them.

“This is a cat and mouse game.”

However, there are ways for teachers to find error-prone bot-generated text.

It can generate text with a human sense of thinking, but it’s really just a very powerful text prediction tool, Banoncini said.

“It wasn’t made to say what was true, it was made to make the likely.”

As a result, you can ask ChatGPT questions based on false assumptions and get answers that are seemingly logical but seriously flawed.

“I asked:

“How do you collect cow eggs?” he said with a laugh.

Bot first advised me to wear gloves to keep bacteria off my hands and showed me how to find a cow’s nest “usually made of hay or straw.”

Karim Abon, a high school accounting teacher, was apparently inspired by this example. To track down scammers, he says, “Maybe we can ask plausible questions, including errors, to see if students use the tool without realizing that the premise of the question is wrong.” I can’t.

While this was going on, someone else mentioned how pupils from wealthier and more educated families have always benefited from homework assistance and speculated that ChatGPT may simply be “levelling the playing field” by providing homework assistance.

Vanoncini concurred that it might serve as a means of “democratising” homework assistance.

How long, though, “will it be that democratic,” with OpenAI now considering creating a subscription version with a $42 monthly cost? He queried.

Vanoncini however emphasised that there are many potentially beneficial uses for the bot in the field of education, including using ChatGPT-generated texts as a starting point for in-class debate and analysis.

It might also encourage teachers to reconsider what they teach and how they teach it, possibly placing more emphasis on the process than the results.

Christian Stamm, an electronics instructor, told AFP that he was “not terrified” and that he saw ChatGPT as an “instrument to move us to the next level.”

“Today, everyone uses a calculator, yet math instruction at school continues.”