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NBC Bay Area's Investigative Unit reports on how educators are navigating developments in generative artificial intelligence and concerns about cheating, inaccurate information, and the spread of misinformation.

“I'm trying to kind of remove the temptation,” said Green, who heads the Technology Ethics program at the university.  “This gets into some very fundamental questions about what the educational system does and how it operates and how it should function in society.”

Green’s concerns aren’t hypothetical.  He believes one of his students used ChatGPT to produce an essay that he then attempted to pass off as his own in class – essentially using artificial intelligence to cheat in Green’s course on ‘Ethics in Artificial Intelligence.’

“It’s not so much the tools themselves but the underlying deception that’s the problem,” said Irina Raicu, who is the director of the Internet Ethics Program at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University.  “It's not – ‘is Chat GPT Good or bad?’ It's that it's really disrupting, and on a very short notice, some of these processes that have been put in place about how to how to teach and how to assess learning.”

Brian Green, director, technology ethics and Irina Raicu, director, Internet Ethics Program, interviewed by NBC Bay Area.