ChatGPT and Christian Virtue

School Has Started, and Students Are Looking to AI for Help. Is this Good?

With the start of the fall semester, students are facing writing assignments and many are looking to artificial intelligence assistants such as ChatGPT for help. What does this say about classroom cheating, virtuous living, and becoming the people that God has created us to be?

Myles Werntz, who teaches at Abilene Christian University, discovered last semester that some of his students were using artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots to write their midterms. The class was a general-education course on Christian Ethics, and almost none of the students had a deep understanding of the subject prior to the class. They did not know that such use of AI was unethical.

After running their midterms through an AI detector, Wentz found that 7 of the 30 papers had been written with AI tools. This was despite the fact that he had included a note in his syllabus prohibiting the use of such tools. In talking with the students who had relied on AI for their midterm papers, he found that the AI assistant ChatGPT had "become what memorization was for my college experience: a foundational part of the process, so basic as to be unquestioned."

Werntz, who went to school before the internet (as I did), was surprised by this extensive use of ChatGPT. Writing in Christianity Today, he reflects on his own education and says, "It was an era of studying flash cards, memorizing by rote, outlining questions by hand, and scouring libraries for answers. These practices seem downright archaic to students in my college classroom today. For them, entire worlds have always been available on their phones."

For decades, internet search engines have helped people to do research, but ChatGPT, which was introduced in 2022, has had a huge impact on education. ChatGPT works off a large language model (LLM) to digest and summarize huge quantities of information, and it answers questions in human-like sentences. But ChatGPT -- along with similar programs such as Google Gemini -- does not really think. Instead, it guesses what a reasonable answer to a question might be.

ChatGPT-generated material is now being used in student papers across the country. The website Intelligent reports that a recent survey of 588 college students found that 37% use ChatGPT. Of these students, 96% use it for schoolwork; 69% use it for help with writing assignments (and 29% of these students have had ChatGPT write entire essays); and 86% say their ChatGPT use has gone undetected. Although they freely use the tool, 3 in 4 of these students believe using ChatGPT is cheating.

The use of AI programs is not limited to the United States. In the United Kingdom, academics are dismayed by the number of ChatGPT essays they are seeing. Des Fitzgerald, a professor at University College Cork, tells Inside Higher Ed that AI tends to produce an essay "with no edges, that does nothing technically wrong or bad, but not much right or good, either."

Evidence of ChatGPT use are little-used words such as "delve" and "multifaceted" and a conversational style that employs terms such as, "Let's explore this theme." A survey of around 10,000 undergraduates in the United Kingdom found that 61 percent use AI at least a little each month, while 31 percent do so every week.

"The allure of these AI programs is simple," says Werntz in Christianity Today, "especially for students. In just seconds they can generate entire research papers. Responding to feedback, they can edit and tweak, building on past interactions to produce better results every time." The ethical problems are clear, but "for an undergraduate on a deadline, the appeal is obvious."

The lure of AI is being felt outside of schools as well. Last month, A Federal District Court in Colorado sanctioned two attorneys for submitting a brief containing nearly 30 defective citations that were generated by AI. An attorney who lives near me in Virginia reported the same thing happening in a trial he recently witnessed.

Werntz responded to the use of ChatGPT in the midterm by switching to an oral exam for the final. He gave students ten possible questions to study in advance, and then they spent 20 minutes talking about one question, chosen at random. "The results were fantastic," reports Werntz. "The students who did well had developed the capacity for nuanced thought, deeply engaged and understood the material, and made connections between topics. Those who had not put in the work did not do well, and they couldn't rely on AI tools for help."

Werntz used this experience to reflect on virtuous living. He asked the question, "Does this tool lead us away from or toward being God's good creatures?" Some tools help us to live more virtuous lives, and some do not. "Virtue is entwined with sanctification in Christ, with the transformation of our hearts and souls by God's grace," said Werntz. "It is living in faith, hope, and love by habit. This is God's gift, but it doesn't happen overnight, and it doesn't happen without us cooperating."

My friend Tom Hibbs, a professor of philosophy at Baylor University, likens the acquisition of virtue to athletic training; both require repetition and hard work; both are most easily learned by following examples. Books and programs can be helpful, of course. But in the end, virtue is best learned by practice, not through abstract thought. As Tom points out, if you want to learn to shoot hoops, playing basketball beats reading a book about basketball.

Virtuous living takes practice, and we get better at it by making a habit of honesty, self-restraint, fairness, and fortitude — continuing to do the right things in the face of difficulty. On top of these good habits, we can add faith, hope and love, the three theological virtues suggested by the apostle Paul (1 Corinthians 13:13). If we live by these virtues, we will be the kind of people that God has created us to be.

As for the use of AI by students, Werntz concluded, "Training students to use and even rely on AI does not give them what they need to flourish intellectually or morally as God's creatures." There very same is true for any of us who are tempted to rely a bit too much on the help offered by AI assistants in our work and personal lives.