"I'd say there are maybe five people in my class who don't use ChatGPT," said Alice, a ninth grade student from Paris, without hesitation. A universal sport as old as school itself, cheating has found a way to reinvent itself with generative artificial intelligence (AI), particularly ChatGPT, OpenAI's chatbot. There's a free version of this particularly intuitive tool, which can be installed on a smartphone. Evidently, few teenagers have not taken this initiative. "Those who don't use it at all are the best students," observed the schoolgirl. "Those who use it to do their homework for them, on the other hand, have pretty poor results. They figure that they might as well get good grades without working too hard."
There are two schools of thought among students. There are those who use ChatGPT to search for answers they are supposed to find on their own – at home or during supervised homework, discreetly, with their phone on their lap or in their pencil case. This "new generation" of cheating tends to be practiced in areas where the students feel they're underperforming or are overwhelmed by the difficulty.
"When I'm tired or don't have time, ChatGPT does my German homework," said Elliot, a 16-year-old high school student from Cergy (northwest of Paris), who admits that Goethe's language isn't exactly his strong point. The artificial intelligence, an excellent translator, is capable of producing a German text "at my level," said the young man, in such a way that it isn't spotted too quickly. All you have to do is ask it.
Stop homework
The other team is made up of students who have turned ChatGPT into their personal assistant while recognizing that using it to do things for them is not of great interest. "I know that if I really want to progress, I have to do things myself," said Alice, who uses the generative AI to come up with ideas for outlines in history, or to write short texts in English. "In maths, on the other hand, ChatGPT wastes my time, because it's often wrong," she told us.
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