New York City's Public Schools Block ChatGPT

The nation's largest school district has cut off access to the chatbot on school computers and networks, citing worries about cheating and about answers that are wrong. Teachers can request access to it for lessons about it.

New York City's Department of Education confirmed this week that it has blocked ChatGPT on the devices and internet networks used in its schools — about 1,800 of them, serving roughly a million students. A spokeswoman said the decision came from "concerns about negative impacts on student learning, and concerns regarding the safety and accuracy of content." Teachers who want to use the program to teach students about it can ask for an exception.

The chatbot, released by OpenAI five weeks ago, will write an essay on any topic in seconds, in passable student prose, and it does not show up in the software schools use to catch copied work, because the text is new every time. Teachers have spent the holidays trading screenshots of essays they suspect it wrote. Several college professors have said they are moving to handwritten exams.

The block is easy to get around — students can use the site from a phone or at home — and everyone involved seems to know it. The department's point is less to stop the program than to mark a position while it works out a real policy. Other large districts, including Los Angeles and Seattle, are reported to be considering the same step.

Not everyone in education agrees. Some teachers argue that a tool their students will use for the rest of their lives belongs in the classroom, not outside it, and that the assignment that can be done by a chatbot was probably not a great assignment. That argument has only just started.