Schools In Western Australia Are Prohibited From ChatGPT's Use, Student Risk Of TEXTing!

Western Australian public schools have banned the use of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbot, ChatGPT. (photo: openai)

JAKARTA - Towards the beginning of the new school year, Western Australian public schools have banned the use of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbot, ChatGPT.

West Australia's Director General of Education Department, Lisa Rodgers, said the website made by OpenAI's starup would be blocked via a firewall or network security tool.

"There's no doubt it's an amazing technology and it can bring interesting opportunities, but for us, we're considering a lot of third-party apps in this regard, I've asked for access to be blocked," Rodgers said.

"(The public school server) is a very large network, it does take time, but everything will be finished on Wednesday," he added.

ChatGPT, or Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer which generates text in response to demand, including articles, essays, jokes, even poetry, and has gained widespread popularity since its debut in November last year.

Indeed, some industries consider this technology quite useful, but universities and schools around the world are worrying.

The reason is, ChatGPT is claimed to be able to make students cheat in exams or assignments. So that not a few institutions and education departments rewrite exam questions, renew plagiarism policies or immediately ban the use of these tools.

Furthermore, Rodgers is also worried that students will still be able to access the tool at home. Even so, he stated, teachers usually know their students well enough to find fraud and plagiarism in their homework or homework.

They know the advantages and special shortcomings of students. To teach, we need to know what students control, what are the gaps in their learning and which fundamentally encourage further teaching steps," said Rodgers.

He added that students should be judged several times in various ways, including classroom assessments, homework, and informal discussions.

"The School Curriculum Standard Authority (SCASA) will update their guidelines in connection with Western Australian Education Certificates and provide information about this type of generative AI technology," Rodgers explained.

"But if this is a high-risk assessment, we already have things that ensure the test is monitored, and the test is taken under fairly tight conditions," he added.

In addition, although teachers cannot access the tool on laptops provided by the department, they can still use it to create student or other resources after school hours.

"We can't stop what people are doing outside of school, so teachers should use ChatGPT. They will collect the resources that meet their students' needs the most," concluded Rodgers.

For information quoted from ABC Net, Tuesday, February 7, Western Australia is Australia's fourth state after NSW, Queensland, and Tasmania, which blocked public school access to the ChatGPT. The latest is Victoria. However, South Australia chose not to ban it.