Q: How can you tell if one of your students has used ChatGPT for their homework?

A: There will be no spelling, punctuation, or grammatical errors in it!

In all seriousness, AI in all its various permutations is here to stay. Interestingly, a recent survey of Russell Group universities revealed that although half had banned the use of Chat GPT entirely, the other half were cautiously optimistic about how it could be used in academic life. A professor at George Washington University in the States recently tweeted about using it to help students develop their critical and evaluative skills. Obviously, in schools its existence is proving to be a double-edged sword, as teachers try to distinguish between genuine homework or coursework, and something knocked off by ChatGPT in a matter of seconds.

For those who are not technologically minded, ChatGPT is a highly sophisticated interface where you can type a question into the chat window and get back an impressively detailed, grammatically correct response, often indistinguishable from a human one, in super quick time. It is an impressive piece of technology. However, when we call it AI – artificial intelligence – it is a bit of a misnomer. Even ChatGPT, with its incredible processing power, can only trawl the internet for content which has already been created. Essentially, it’s a kind of uber-Google which gives the illusion of a conversation because it formats its findings into comprehensible sentences.

Alongside the threat of plagiarism that we might fear, there are many benefits to this technology – you can collate information, draw together material for planning and even create sample essays and answers to critique. In one of my recent GCSE English Lit revision classes we set the AI a comparative poetry question and then compared it to what the students had come up with – reassuringly, the students’ writing was more nuanced and sophisticated!

Technology itself, of course, is neutral. 1 Timothy 6v10 tells us that ‘the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil’ and this truth is often misquoted as ‘money is the root of all evil’. It is of course, the love of money that is dangerous. Money itself can be put to all kinds of kingdom uses or it can be hoarded up and worshiped. Human technology can be used for good or evil. Gutenberg’s printing press enabled the Bible to be distributed all over Europe, but the printing press also churned out material that was not as edifying. The same is true of the internet and even the most technologically advanced, impressive systems like ChatGPT can only gather and synthesise human output – and human error. The AI art programmes are just copying the style and form of what has already been painted or drawn.

None of these so-called Artificial Intelligences are original, none of them are truly creative. It is human beings – ‘made in God’s image’ as we are reminded in Genesis 1 - who alone reflect our Creator God. Our imperfect attempts at creativity are a tiny reflection of God’s incredible creative power. The smooth, flawless AI-generated photographs and paintings are only an air-brushed replication of what human beings have already created and, whilst it can produce technically competent non-fiction tasks, ChatGPT still struggles with the nuance and complexity of literary analysis.

Dr C.W. Howell, a US lecturer who has used ChatGPT with his undergraduate students, shared a wry comment by one of his students on Twitter: ‘I’m not worried about AI getting to where we are now. I’m much more worried about the possibility of us reverting to where AI is.’ However impressive the processing power of these new AI engines, however quickly they can find answers to the most complex technical conundrums, however many sonnets, sagas and sunsets they create – remember that this all comes out of the mind of man and is just a drop in the ocean compared with the unknowable riches and depths of God’s wisdom and creativity.

Cassie Martin is Head of English and CPD Lead at a secondary school in Gloucestershire

This article is based on one written by the author for the June edition of Evangelicals Now