According to a new survey by the Pew Research Center, Generation Z youth are actively using the ChatGPT chatbot from OpenAI to complete school assignments. The study covered about 1,400 teenagers in the US aged thirteen to seventeen. Twenty-six percent of respondents said they had used ChatGPT for homework. This is twice as many as two years ago.
More than half of the surveyed teens — fifty-four percent — consider it acceptable to use ChatGPT for researching new topics. Twenty-nine percent find it useful for solving math problems, and eighteen percent — for writing essays.
The study showed that GPT-4, the model powering ChatGPT, does not always provide accurate answers, especially on topics such as social mobility and Africa’s geopolitics. This may be particularly important for teenagers who actively use this tool for learning. According to Pew data, Black and Hispanic teens use ChatGPT for school assignments more often than white teens.
The impact of ChatGPT on education remains controversial. Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania found that Turkish high school students with access to ChatGPT performed worse on math tests. Another study showed that German students using ChatGPT found research materials more easily but synthesized them less successfully.
