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Maine teachers using ChatGPT to their advantage

"It's a lot of factual errors, and it's going to be pretty obvious for teachers," one teacher at Greely High School said.

CUMBERLAND, Maine — You've probably heard of ChatGPT. It can generate entire essays about just about any topic you can think of by scouring the internet and using artificial intelligence.

Some teachers are curious about ChatGPT but are also showing students a way to find factual errors in the program's work. 

"This is probably a massive movement in the future of education," Jason Curry, a teacher at Greely High, said. 

Curry is a social studies teacher at Greely, and he said ChatGPT is actually unreliable.

"It's a lot of factual errors, and it's going to be pretty obvious for teachers and people in the public sphere to see what's been done by a chatbot and what's been done by a human," Curry said. 

The staff at Greely High gathered together for a meeting to talk about the program and what it can and cannot do. 

"ChatGPT can't create, adapt, or make predictions into the future," Gregory Greenleaf, an English teacher at Greely High, said. 

Greenleaf put ChatGPT to the test in their classroom during an anonymous essay writing competition. He threw in one written by ChatGPT.

"ChatGPT has written an essay and was in the round, and ChatGPT didn't even make it out of the first round," Greenleaf said. 

"The students in my class read those essays and fact-check them. And so, then anything they find, it can be like a scavenger hunt of errors," Curry said. 

A fear teachers have about the website is the artificial intelligence behind it.

"They can gather information about what you're doing and use that information for corporate needs and uses," Curry said. 

Another big concern is that some of that information could be coming from students under 13 years of age, which would violate federal laws meant to protect them.

It's illegal for anyone under 13 to use ChatGPT because federal law prohibits information being collected for anyone under that age.

While some schools may try and ban the entire program, educators say they know that will inevitably it will show up in the classroom. 

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