An Important Note for My Students Regarding the Use of ChatGPT

Douglas McManaman

Recently I came across a journal assignment that had an opening sentence that was word for word identical to that of another student. I mentioned this to my daughter and she just smiled. She said: ChatGPT. I asked her to explain to me how this works, so she took one of my journal assignments that my students are required to complete and showed me how it is done, by actually inputting the url links to the articles I had assigned and the questions I wanted them to cover. Lo and behold, a very well written journal assignment that summarizes an article that I wrote, as well as an article from a recent pope, and which incorporates answers to the questions I assigned. The AI product even included a line that began with: “I learned that…”, a line that I see very often from my students.

Now, I have no problem with students using AI in order to procure basic information–I will often use it myself to summarize a book that I am interested in purchasing, to see if I want to pursue the book further. The problem with using ChatCPT to do an assignment for you, however, is fundamentally a moral problem, and a serious one at that. I’d like to explain this, because for some reason, I had a difficult time getting my daughter to understand this, which made me wonder whether some of my students would also have the same difficulty. 

So, allow me to make two points. The first is that using ChatCPT to complete an assignment for you is really no different than having someone do your homework, essay, or journal for you. In short, it is a matter of cheating, which in turn is a matter of lying. This brings me to my next point: you and I determine our moral identity, our character, by the moral choices that we make. Moral character is not the same as one’s personality. Character describes the kind of person that you are, the kind of person that you have made yourself to be by the moral choices you have made and continue to make in your life. So, a person can have a very nice personality, but bad moral character–he or she might be a liar, which is a person who cannot be trusted. And I become a liar by choosing to lie, or a thief by choosing to take something that does not belong to me, or a killer by actually killing someone, or an adulterer by choosing to commit adultery, etc. 

What frightens me about students who use ChatGPT to complete a journal assignment that involves reading an article and/or watching a video is that they are becoming liars, persons who cannot be trusted. Now, this is a problem because every moral choice we make comes back to us in the end, either to bless us or curse us. It was always a challenge to get my young grade 9 students to understand the harm they do to themselves when they lie–sure, they often get away with it, but the deficiency in their character which their choice brought about stays with them until they make a choice inconsistent with their previous lie–which is what it means to repent, that is, to have a change of heart. But it is disconcerting to think that some adults, not all, need to have this pointed out to them. One’s character is one’s “heart” (the will), and so a good character is a good heart. I’ve always said to my students that character is everything. Our eternal destiny is determined by our character, and the more I go on in life, the more I see that the problems of this world for the most part boil down to matters of character. There is so much suffering in this life as a result of deficient moral character. What is at the root of failed marriages? Very often it’s a matter of bad character, i.e, someone’s infidelity, or impatience, or taking oneself too seriously, selfishness, etc. What is at the root of traffic jams? Often it is a matter of construction, but too often it is a matter of a serious vehicle accident up ahead, which in turn was the result of impatience, which is a moral vice–someone was in too much of a hurry and was driving recklessly. No need to spell out the root causes of war, poverty and hunger. Everything we do comes back to us in the end. Eastern religions referred to this as karma, which is a teaching that expresses a universal experience.

The purpose of an assignment, in my case a religion assignment, is to have my students acquire the knowledge and intellectual disposition that they will need in the classroom, in order to create the conditions in their own classrooms that will allow students to question further and build on what we give them, which often leads to new avenues to explore and new insights. All this gets thwarted when we choose to use AI tools to do the work for us.