‘Is this an appropriate use of AI or not?’: teachers say classrooms are now AI testing labs

Educators are trying to understand how these tools work and, perhaps most pressingly, how they can be misused

In the year since OpenAI released ChatGPT, high school teacher Vicki Davis has been rethinking every single assignment she gives her students. Davis, a computer science teacher at Sherwood Christian Academy in Georgia, was well-positioned to be an early adopter of the technology. She's also the IT director at the school and helped put together an AI policy in March: the school opted to allow the use of AI tools for specific projects so long as students discussed it with their teachers and cited the tool. In Davis's mind, there were good and bad uses of AI, and ignoring its growing popularity was not going to help students unlock the productive uses or understand its dangers.

It's actually changed how I design my projects because there are some times I want my students to use AI, and then there are times I don't want them to," Davis said. What am I trying to teach here? Is this an appropriate use of AI or not?"