Fossil Ridge High School students and teachers are exploring the usefulness of artificial intelligence in the classroom.

Long-term teachers Todd Forkner and Brendan Gallagher said they don’t see chat GPT as destructive to education.

 “I think that if you can automate something that’s better done by a machine that frees up a lot of time and energy for humans to do more important things,” said Forkner, who teaches English.

Still, Forkner said that the technology must be used with care. 

“I do try to teach my students how to be responsible about it, and to make good decisions about how they use such tools. That’s always been my thing,” Forkner said. “I talk to my students a lot about ethics. And the consequences of plagiarism and I think that they generally try to respect that”

Forkner teaches students how to use these tools respectfully and responsibly, rather than banning them. In one of his classes he took a writing sample from a student and generated two artificial intelligence versions of the same assignment. 

“What I asked my students to do is to compare these and rate them,” Forkner said. “They chose the student’s sample as the best piece of writing.”

Video production Brendan Gallagher is another teacher who is attempting to find a way for students to use Chat GPT resources without being dependent upon them.

“I think it is foolish for us not to look at how students are using it and meet them where they are at and talk about how we use it moving forward,” Gallagher said.

AI is too innovative to not eventually have a place in a school setting, Gallagher said. “AI is the single most important technological evolution happening now and in the foreseeable future, so it is bound to be used.”

FRHS senior Ash Gensel said students probably use AI more than teachers realize.

“We’re going to spend the same amount of time making sure that the AI is undetectable and rewriting it than we would if we had actually just written the essay in the first place,” Gensel said. “And in the end you can’t even tell that it was written by AI .”

“Obviously AI isn’t capable of helping a student cheat all the way through school,” Forkner said,  “and it has its own issues just like any other technology, but it can be used to assist students.”

“It is very easy to use it to give you some sort of basis on what to write about, and I feel like it’s a tool that we can and should be able to use to our advantage,” Gensel said.

Gensel thinks AI is a good resource to help brainstorm writing on a topic. 

Humans can only come up with so many ideas on their own. AI can do the rest according to Gensel.