ChatGPT for Teachers and Students: A Friend or a Foe?

Goodbye, sleepless nights. Goodbye, weekends spent grading essays and planning lessons. When ChatGPT was introduced in November 2022, many teachers felt relieved—finally, a tool to make their lives easier! But students felt the same way.

“Why should I waste time on research when ChatGPT can do it for me?” one student remarked.

The words that struck me most? Waste time. He didn’t realize that research isn’t just a step in the process—it’s a crucial part of learning, just as important as writing itself.

Let’s be honest—ChatGPT can be a game-changer for teachers. It can generate text in seconds, suggest engaging classroom activities, create lesson plans, design scavenger hunts, draft presentation scripts, or even summarize entire works of Shakespeare in the blink of an eye.

But here’s the catch: it can also write our students’ essays, do their homework, and—most worryingly—think for them. As ChatGPT continues to shape our classrooms, one critical question emerges: is it a friend or an enemy?

ChatGPT is easy to use, widely accessible, and offers a robust free version. It processes information faster than we ever could, helping when our minds go blank or when paperwork piles up. It sparks creativity by generating lesson ideas, discussion prompts, and assessment questions, saving valuable time for teachers. It can also personalize learning, offering students alternative explanations or summaries when they struggle with a concept.

Additionally, ChatGPT adapts to its users. You can train it to match your preferred tone and style, making it a valuable assistant for drafting emails, reports, or presentations. Some educators even use it to brainstorm innovative teaching strategies. With a paid version available at just $20 per month, many believe it’s a worthwhile investment.

Despite its benefits, ChatGPT has significant limitations. It sometimes provides outdated or incorrect information, as it doesn’t always have access to the most recent updates. If you ask it to create a test, never trust it blindly—always double-check the answers before using them in class.

Another major concern is over-reliance. If students use ChatGPT to complete their assignments without thinking critically, they risk losing essential skills like problem-solving, creativity, and independent reasoning. The more we rely on AI to do our work, the less we develop our own cognitive abilities.

AI-generated text also tends to be formulaic. It often lacks personal voice, depth, and originality. If everyone relies on ChatGPT for motivation letters, essays, or reports, they will all start sounding the same—devoid of individuality. And most importantly, if students don’t engage in the process of writing and research, they lose the ability to judge the quality of information themselves.

The most important lesson we can teach our students is this: ChatGPT is a tool. Just like a calculator helps with math but doesn’t replace the need to understand numbers, ChatGPT should assist—not replace—their thinking. It can provide information, offer ideas, and suggest alternative perspectives, but it should never form their opinions or do their work entirely.

If there’s one thing students need to learn in the AI era, it’s how to use ChatGPT responsibly.

Wondering if a student’s work was written by ChatGPT? Here are some red flags:

• The language feels slightly off—either too complex or too generic.
• The tone lacks personality.
• The vocabulary is overly academic.
• The structure is predictable: introduction, body (often with subheadings, bullet points, or lists), and a conclusion (frequently, the word “conclusion” is literally written at the end).
• It might contain extra, unrelated information the student didn’t ask for.

Here’s something fun to try: if you ask ChatGPT whether it wrote a specific text, it might deny it—even if it just generated it for you!

Of course, there are AI-detection tools like ZeroGPT and Quillbot, but they’re not always reliable. For instance, it can sometimes detect text as written by AI when it was entirely written by a human, and vice versa.

Students should use AI as a tool—just like a remote control. But they should never let it control them.

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