As AI Throws Education Into Chaos, OpenAI Introduces 'Study Mode' to Help Students 'Learn'

AI has been blamed for a tsunami of cheating that’s taken hold in the U.S. educational system in recent years. Just this week, I interviewed a college professor who explained how bad it’s gotten lately—particularly when it comes to AI-generated essay writing. Now, one of the heavy hitters of the AI industry, OpenAI, says it is launching a tool designed to help students learn stuff instead of just passively accepting dubious information delivered by a chatbot.

“Today we’re introducing study mode in ChatGPT—a learning experience that helps you work through problems step by step instead of just getting an answer,” the company wrote in a blog post published Tuesday. OpenAI said that the service is now available to “logged in users” with accounts from the Free, Plus, Pro, and Team tiers. The company added that, within the next few weeks, the service would also be rolled out for ChatGPT Edu, an account tier specifically designed for use on college campuses.

According to the company, Study Mode is supposed to engage students with questions and answers that are interactive. Instead of the version of AI use that involves the slack-jawed copying and pasting of content generated by a chatbot into a Word document, Study Mode is designed, through its quasi-Socratic nature, to keep the user mentally active (that’s the theory, at least). Students are “met with guiding questions” that “calibrate responses to their objective and skill level to help them build deeper understanding,” the company claims. “Study mode is designed to be engaging and interactive, and to help students learn something—not just finish something,” the post states.

OpenAI also cops to the fact that its own industry has been implicated in a groundswell of automated cheating in colleges and high schools, writing that AI’s “use in education has also raised an important question: how do we ensure it is used to support real learning, and doesn’t just offer solutions without helping students make sense of them?” The company claims the tool’s code was created with input from “teachers, scientists, and pedagogy experts” so as to keep the process grounded in the world of (human) education.

I guess it’s nice that OpenAI has created a tool intended to make students use their brains, but the real question is how many students will actually use it. The thing is, kids are cheating because it’s easy. The ones intrinsically motivated to learn might find it to be another useful study tool—but recent studies have claimed that increased AI use while studying may contribute to a shallower grasp on the topics being researched.