“It is exhausting because it is recurring, there are several students who I warn not to do it with AI and they do it again,” says Hernán Ojeda, 33 years old and a high school language and literature teacher in Buenos Aires (Argentina). After two years of existence, ChatGPT and other AI tools are now fully implemented and are commonly used in schools and universities. But the debate on how to correctly introduce these tools into classes is slower than reality, and teachers are increasingly overwhelmed by the ease with which AI can solve any exercise.

“The students have no interest in trying to keep me from noticing, which adds to the general reluctance of adolescents with school,” says Ojeda, who published (with his social nickname) a viral message in September. in X about his frustration over the pointless use of AI in homework. His message joins that of other teachers around the world who regret the immediate use that these AIs are given for any task.

“I’m not a teacher anymore. “I’m just a human plagiarism detector,” wrote Amy Clukey, a professor at the University of Louisville. “Now, I spend time checking to see if a student wrote their own work. What a waste of life.” Another article titled “I have stopped teaching because of ChatGPT”by Professor Victoria Livingstone in Timehe regretted that his effort to adapt had been in vain. In their text, the students sophisticated their requests and tools to avoid having to write even a paragraph. “Students who delegate their writing to AI miss the opportunity to think more deeply about their work,” Livingstone said.

This frustration is not just limited to language or literature classes. Gabriel Rodríguez teaches programming at a vocational training institute in Seville. In his first course he gives the basics of programming: “I seek to shape the head so that they think how they should think, with algorithms,” he says. There it completely prohibits AIs. But some kids still use them. Secondly, he does teach code more dedicated to what his professional world will be like and integrates AI into his classes.

All the teachers consulted by this newspaper know that “you have to adapt,” but the road to that adaptation is full of potholes and unforeseen problems. They are also tired of hearing on networks and in reality that they lack vocation or that they must improve their methods. “It is demoralizing, because since I began to study as a teacher, I went with the idea of ​​moving the ways of traditional teaching, I always look for a way to make it dynamic, entertaining and not the question and answer dynamic of before, of memorizing,” says Ojeda. That is why he finds the response of some students more frustrating: “They are looking for the repetition of something that already exists. They give the exercise to the chat and they already deliver something with that”, they copy and paste often without paying attention to any detail.

Ojeda, for example, must deal with the mobile phone in the classroom: “Here they use a lot of AI that is integrated into WhatsApp” on the mobile phone, says Ojeda, who adds an important detail: “With the economic moment that the country is experiencing, being so “Books and even photocopies of books are expensive, most of the material is digital,” he adds. That is why they must always have their cell phone in class and some take the opportunity to copy the assignment into the free WhatsApp AI and paste the answer. Meta has not yet deployed its WhatsApp AI in Europe: it is just another chat where the machine responds.

It’s hard not to play the police

This laziness of students is something that teachers must remedy in some way. Before ChatGPT, lazy students responded too briefly. Now, however, they solve them without even looking at them. “You don’t have to play the police,” says Belén Palop, professor at the Faculty of Education and Teacher Training Center at the Complutense University of Madrid. “The student is telling you that you must change, that he has trolled the system. It is about continuing to grow constantly, which is mandatory for teachers.”

The arrival of the calculator decades ago is a repeated comparison among teachers. There are, however, nuances: all mathematics teachers assume that first you have to know how to do simple operations and then the calculator is standardized. “The calculator is very good when the task is more complex, but they must learn to do the basic things,” says Palop.

The teacher observes a parallel between the calculator and ChatGPT: “Should all children learn to write? Yes. Should everyone be a Nobel Prize winner? No”. But between knowing how to write and winning a Nobel there is more distance than between knowing multiplication tables and then doing square roots with a calculator.

“Using it in a didactic way is great because it is like having a private teacher at home. But it also happens that, and this is where the teachers’ frustration comes from, the students pass the task to the AI, it responds to them in five minutes and they no longer think anymore,” says Rodríguez.

The pain of missing things

“One of the things that really worries me is that AI makes them miss the process of improving their writing,” says Gaby Silva, a literature teacher in Guayaquil (Ecuador). “The terrible thing is that you end up becoming the AI ​​police. I feel sorry for having to be suspicious all the time. Before you only controlled that it did not copy and paste something,” he adds.

As a teacher, one of her great joys was seeing the progress of people who started worse and really improved, says Silva: “I am very happy that my students are improving in their writing, but now my happiness is not complete because I don’t know if they have improved or put it in an AI.”

There is an important detail that is often forgotten in these cases: the will of the students. Rodríguez explains the case of another professor who bases his classes on the potential of AI. “It is the students themselves who complain about why AI is used for everything in class, because they say that they are not acquiring knowledge in the same way,” he says. Sometimes it is the students themselves who say that they will use it once they learn the basics of their training.

It is evident that there are teachers who have found ways to judiciously use details of AI: “I recently went to a talk by a teacher who had his students describe something in the most precise way. so Dall-E [un generador de imágenes a partir de texto] returned the image they wanted. Now suddenly describing well became important,” explains Palop.

But is that description for an AI to create the best one to then describe a state of mind or a complex action? It may be, but it is not obvious. Meanwhile, teachers must deal with students who have become and perhaps are internalizing an old and unnatural language: “The terminology used by the AI ​​is usually more pompous, not typical of children or even Argentine speakers. “It is neutral Spanish,” says Ojeda. “There are empty constructions, which sound very nice, but they are like a politician’s speech that points to great concepts and does not say anything significant,” he adds.

The detection work to know which students use AI is complicated, but not impossible. According to Rodríguez, with code it is easier than with language: “With programming, detecting it is easy because it is shameless. You know each student and how they program. You know when a code is quality, when it is not and what tools they know. If they use commands that we have not seen or have extremely good code quality, you know that they did not do it,” says Rodríguez.