When members of the Tennessee General Assembly convened the 113th General Session last January, ChatGPT was less than two months old.
Today 100 million people use the artificial intelligence (AI) platform each week and it’s a leading part of the AI revolution that’s widely predicted to impact our daily lives. That’s especially true for students and teachers, and Representative Scott Cepicky, R-Culleoka, believes Tennessee classrooms need guardrails for artificial intelligence sooner than later.
Cepicky’s is proposing a bill to require each university and K-12 school district in Tennessee to develop a policy for how both teachers and students will be allowed to utilize AI.
“If you tell AI right now write me a 500-word essay on ‘fill in the blank,’ it will generate it for you probably about five minutes, if that long, and it will be perfectly grammatically correct. Well, that’s a red flag to most teachers right,” said Cepicky. “This is something that we’ve never had to deal with before. Of the ability for a student, even in college, to speak a thought and have paper come out to turn in.”
Representative Cepicky says Tennessee currently has no state guidelines for AI and he began working on his bill after receiving reports last year of students using artificial intelligence to plagiarize work for a term paper.
Cepicky says he sees many positive uses for AI, especially for tutoring, but feels it’s important to begin creating guidelines now to ensure the technology is not misused and to get ahead of AI as its impact grows.
“There are significant advantages to artificial intelligence in the classroom,” said Cepicky. “We have to be careful of where this can lead to. We have to maintain that our kids are still learning and not developing a crutch on artificial intelligence to do the work for them.”
Representative Cepicky’s bill is among the first to be filed for the upcoming legislative session.
Members of the General Assembly will return to Nashville on Tuesday.
