Close All Tabs - From MIT’s TeachLab: The Homework Machine

Episode Date: September 3, 2025

The Close All Tabs team is taking the week off, but we wanted to share something else we think you’ll be into: a new mini series from MIT’s TeachLab Podcast. It’s called The Homework Machine, and it dives deep into how teachers and students are navigating the arrival of generative AI in schools.  Episode one is titled “Buckle Up, Here It Comes.” In late November of 2022, ChatGPT was released to the public as a free research preview. Pretty quickly, students figured out ChatGPT was really good at doing their homework for them. Schools scrambled to figure out what to do: Ban it? Embrace it? Teachers and students found themselves adapting to a new reality.  Hosts Jesse Dukes and Justin Reich share stories of teachers and students reacting to the arrival of an exciting, alarming, and strange new technology. Further reading/listening:  TeachLab Presents: The Homework Machine – TeachLab from MIT Teachers Strike Back Against AI Cheating – Close All Tabs Read the transcript here Want to give us feedback on the series? Shoot us an email at [e-mail] You can also follow us on Instagram Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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think you'll be into. Last week, we looked at how some teachers are dealing with the explosion of AI cheating in classrooms, from detection tools to rethinking how they grade, even bringing back the trusty blue book. If that episode grabbed your attention and you want to go even further down the rabbit hole, check out the first installment of a new series from MIT's Teach Lab podcast. It's called The Homework Machine, and it dives deep into how teachers and students are navigating the arrival of generative AI in schools. Here's episode one. Buckle up, here it comes. That's the name of the episode. This is the Teach Lab podcast. I'm Justin Reich. And I'm Jesse Dukes. Devin O'Neill is a high school social studies teacher in Oregon. Back in 2021, after six years of teaching, she took two years off

while her husband attended grad school, at MIT, actually. And during her break from teaching, she worked designing classroom curriculum. Which is a super cool experience, very good. Very, very different from being in the classroom and also really reinforced that I wanted to be in the classroom. When she was on her break, O'Neill missed two momentous years for schools. There was a pandemic, remote learning, hybrid learning, returning to school buildings. And when she went back to the classroom in the fall of 2023, she said there was some culture shock. It was those two like super crazy post-COVID years. So I come back and it's like, like those movies where like the caveman like de-frosts or whatever, and they're like, what is this?

It wasn't just that her fellow teachers were harrowed and burned out while she was fresh and energetic. She also noticed that the student work was, well, different from what she remembered. I would have these really well-written paragraphs or snippets that look to be very well research and all this, but not at all on topic. Grammar was off, even the most brilliant 14-year-old still talks like a 14-year-old and still writes like a 14-year-old. So the grammar was oddly good. O'Neill can see her student screens, and she sometimes watches them work. And one day, she noticed they were using an unusual search engine.

Bing! I was noticing that a lot of them were using Bing to Google stuff. See, even to Google stuff. And I was like, that's the weirdest choice. who uses Bing? And then one day, she was watching a student complete a writing assignment in a Google Doc. And poof, a whole well-written paragraph just appeared out of nowhere. Like one minute's not there, one minute's there.

And it said, like, here's your results. And they forgot to delete that. And that's when Devin realized her students were using ChatGPT to complete in-class writing assignments. They would copy and paste the question she would do. give them into Bing's co-pilot, which was a free way to use chat GPT. Then the students copied the answer, sometimes without any editing right into their Google document. Which is kind of a rookie mistake.

Like, if they're going to cheat, you want them to cheat a little bit better. We first talked to Devin in 2023, just a few weeks after she figured out what was going on. She says that since then, she's gotten a lot more savvy about chat GPT. But her experience speaks to how much can and did change in schools in just a couple of years. In November of 2022, ChatGPT was launched as a free research preview of advanced generative AI, like a pilot or a beta version. Generative AI is a type of artificial intelligence that can create new content, especially text, but also images, videos, and music.

ChatGPT is the most famous example of generative AI. There are competitors like Google's Gemini, Anthropics Claude, and the Chinese company Deepseek. And rather quickly, students, figured out chat GPT was pretty good at doing their homework for them. Devin, out of school for two years, working on curriculum, had missed the arrival of the new homework machine, but her students had not. The arrival of chat GPT and then fairly quick upgrades within a couple of years has been

the big story in education technology since the fall of 2022. Students can drop an assignment into something like chat GPT, click a button, and their homework is done. She's talking about chat GPT. School districts like New York City are banning it. Chat GPT is the new artificial intelligence tool causing a stir. Schools have scrambled to figure out what to do about chat GPT. Ban it, embrace it.

Teachers have scrambled to get ahead of the cheating problem and to find ways in which AI can support education. Some students have scrambled to figure out how to use AI without their teachers detecting it. And education technology companies have scrambled to create AI-powered ed tech. and have made many promises about how generative AI will transform education. But I think we're at the cost of using AI for probably the biggest positive transformation that education has ever seen. And the way we're going to do that is by giving every student on the planet an artificially

intelligent but amazing personal tutor. My career has been devoted to studying education technology. Over and over again, we've seen that new technologies emerge in education and the technology developers will promise every time that the new tech will transform and democratize education. That's what's about to happen. And while the technologies do sometimes help teachers and students, those big transformations to schools, they never happen. But there is something different about ChatGPT and other AI. Throughout history, most education technology has been adopted by schools, who hope it will help

them do better work teaching students. But generative AI wasn't invited into the schools. Not for the most part. It crashed the party. Even if schools ban it from school laptops, students can often get around that ban by using Bing, for example. Or they have their own laptop, or they can access it on their mobile phone, which over 95% of teenagers have. So the kids have access to generative AI, and they're using it whether their teachers want them to or not. That's having a big impact on schools. Now, a little about me in this project. I am a journalist, and for the past year and a half, I've been working with Justin and

and other colleagues at MIT's teaching systems lab. We've interviewed over 90 teachers and school leaders and over 30 students about how all of this is actually playing out in schools. I've been hearing about why students cheat using AI, what teachers are doing to stop them, how some teachers and students have found chat GPT to be helpful for learning. And for the next several weeks, we're going to share what we've learned with you in a mini-series

we're calling the homework machine. And now, Jesse, who has immersed himself in this research, will be our host, guide for these episodes. Jesse, you can take it from here. Thanks, Justin, but not so fast. We're going to want your historical knowledge about educational technology to help us unpack and contextualize these stories. So stay close, keep your mic handy. In fact, we're going to hear from you again in this episode. Sounds good. All right, well, let's go back to a beginning, December of 2022. We'll start with Steve Ulet. He's a technology director at the Westwood School District

southwest of Boston. His job includes keeping track of computers and software for the district, but also helping teachers think through how to use technology in their work. He remembers the exact moment he heard about generative AI. So I think it was December 8th, and I was home sick with COVID. I got an email, I'm on a list serve with all the tech directors in Massachusetts, and I got an email that said, have AI. write your next English paper, the subcaption was, buckle up, here it comes. Someone had basically shared a video of this thing called Chatcheebt that was generating an essay about, I think it was about Raisin in the Sun. And I was like, what is going on here?

Watching the video, Ulet says he immediately realized that this was a big deal. Yeah, that was a moment. You know, I've been in this business. since 1993, and I don't remember having a really specific, like, reaction to something the way I did when I saw that. Ulet emailed the district superintendent and explained the situation to her. There was a new technological tool available to students that could do their homework pretty effectively. And she had no idea what it was.

And I explained to her what it was and sent her a link. And she shot back to me five minutes later, and she's like, yeah, we need to write about this. And so we felt, we both felt this sense of, like, urgency. The superintendent asked Ulet to write a memo to the district's teachers. Ulet is a technology guy, and out of curiosity and excitement, he decided to experiment. Could ChachyPT draft the memo? He asked Chachypti to write the first draft and send it to the superintendent. She read it and told Ulet, this is pretty formal language.

It doesn't sound like you. Make it more casual sounding. But Ullette didn't rewrite the memo himself. He prompted Chat GPT to revise the memo, and he told it, make it more conversational. I said, you need to write something funny about how, you know, France was going to win the World Cup, and it, like, seamlessly incorporated a little, like, parenthetical thing about,

Oh, by the way, France is going to win the World Cup. And in the way it did it was like magnificent. Here's the memo, ChatGPT wrote. ChatGPT could also be used to help students learn other languages, such as Spanish or French, which, by the way, I think will win the 2022 World Cup. Imagine being able to have a conversation with ChatGPT in French and receiving instant corrections and feedback. on your pronunciation and grammar. The possibilities are truly endless.

Side note, I'm not that impressed with how Chat Chipit did with that World Cup joke. It says that French will win the World Cup, not France. But that aside, they sent the memo out that Monday. Remember, this was December of 2022. Over the next few months, Ulet formed an AI working group in the district. They brought in a guest speaker. They looked at academic policies. They talked to teachers and students, and by the summer of 2023, they had revised academic integrity guidelines as well as some basic training for teachers.

The goal was to inform staff about what this stuff is, to let them know that there are guidelines, and that if they have students, you know, in grades eight or higher, they can use it with their students. but we also wanted to inform staff how to use it for themselves to make their own work more efficient. The theory behind that is if they're using it, then they'll be more informed to use it responsibly with their kids. And it's nowhere near what it needs to be, I'll be the first to admit it, but we did something. What Westwood did was quite a bit more than other districts.

Last fall, a survey found only about one quarter, of teachers said their school district had provided any guidance or professional development about AI. That's two years after the arrival of the technology. At Westwood, the faculty learned about chat GPT pretty early on, likely before many of their students heard about it. That was not true for other schools. The first time I heard about chat GPT was in my English class. This is Nanky Carr. She just graduated from American High School in Fremont, California. and she heard about chat GPT from another student back in the spring of 2023. We were having a conversation about how we were going to approach our research paper assignment

that was coming up, and you would have to pick an individual of American significance and prove why they were of American significance and what impact they had. And he was talking about how he just asked this AI platform about how his person of American insignificance who was... Had an impact on America and he got a really strong thesis statement and he said I didn't even have to do anything. Now, I bleeped that last bit so this student won't get in trouble. But the point here, Nanky says the thesis statement was actually pretty good.

And we were all confused and we were like, what are you talking about? Like, how did you not have to do anything and how do you have such a strong thesis statement? Because we were just learning how to write a thesis statement at that time. And he said, there's this online platform. It's driven by artificial intelligence, and it just writes it for you. And it's really thorough. It's really good. You guys should try it.

And so that was the first time I heard about it, and I was shocked. Nanky talked with our colleague Holly McDeed, a reporter based in California. Did you try it? I did go home and try it. Not for the same assignment, but I went home and I looked it up, like chat GPT, open AI, what is it? and then I asked it a couple questions, like, what is the weather like? And if I were to write a story about a given situation, could you write me a story? And it actually answered all my prompts, and it wrote me like a solid paragraph.

And so I was shocked, yeah. Nanky says she doesn't know what the other student did with his thesis statement. But she has a guess. So I think he did turn it in, and I don't know what kind of disciplinary action he got, because there wasn't really much set in stone. Do you suspect he didn't get any disciplinary action? I do suspect that because he was oddly smug about how well he had done on that assignment. As far as Nanky knows, that student didn't get in any trouble.

In fact, she's not sure the teachers knew about ChatGBTGBT at that point. And Nanky says that the schools didn't seem to catch on that students were using Chat ChbT to cheat until the fall of 2023, the next school year. a whole year after ChatGPT launched. But Nanky says when they did realize what was happening, the school came down hard. Nanky's AP English teacher held a special class meeting to present the new academic integrity policy

with a list of sanctions if students were caught using Chat GPT or other AI. Which included zeros on the assignments or administrative disciplinary action. And if worse came to worse, then it would be suspensions. At American High School, Nanki says their policies didn't just ban chat GPT. Students were also told they couldn't use grammarly, the grammar check program,

or similar AI tools that are often built into students' browsers. But the policies weren't applied consistently. Nunky says her social studies teacher actually encouraged her to use AI for research. Because she said, I think it's a really good tool to get all the facts in one spot. obviously I'm going to ask you guys to fact check and just cross-check, make sure that everything is correct. But I think it's a really great, you know, tool for you guys to use so that you have everything in one place. Was that confusing for you or other students? It was confusing for me personally because I was like, I just don't want to use it at all.

Like, I don't even care because I don't need like this habit. I don't want it on my computer. I don't want it anywhere. Like, I just wanted, like, away from me because I didn't want to jeopardize any chance of having a good grade in that class or in any of my classes. Some 3,000 miles away from Nanky, another student had quite a different experience. Woody Goss was wrapping up eighth grade in a public school in the suburbs north of New York City when he spoke to us in the spring of 2024. He says his teachers didn't really respond to the arrival of chat GPT. and that students used AI to get their schoolwork done in almost all of his classes.

He says his science class was the worst. The students all have laptops, but the teacher sits in front of the class and can't see what's on the screens. Woody sits in the back. And you can see everybody's screen, and you can see Chat Chpte spitting out the text, and you can see them copy and pasting it into their paper. You could literally see your fellow students using Chat Chepti. not in the way... And copy and pasting it into the paper, yeah.

If you had to estimate, say, in a classroom of 20 students, how many were using chat GPT to cheat the way that you're describing? How many would you say? Okay, so I'd say that there's 10 people in that class using it for everything, like cheating on the whole paper is AI. I'd say there's another five that probably half of it's written by AI, but they do actually read it through and go, gee, maybe I don't want to include the part that says,

as a large language model, but they, like, read it through and copy parts and splice bits and do whatever. Then I'd say, so you've got five remaining? I'd say probably four of that five do the paper legitimately. So there's four people doing it legitimately. And then there's another one that's, I don't know, It's kind of a mix. Like they plagiarized up, but it's like a paragraph in their entire thing.

And I'd say, of those four, I mean, unless you've got a really not a super smart tech kid, I'd say probably all four of those are using AI in some way. It's just using it appropriately. Woody says that some of his teachers were apparently totally oblivious to generative AI. But not as science teacher. She tried to encourage students to use it in a way that would help them learn. That teacher was really trying. She seemed to grasp the concept that there was AI being used, and she was like, we're going to learn how to use AI legitimately and, like, how do we use it in our research?

And everybody heard, oh, you can use AI in your paper. And they all didn't actually listen to what she was saying. Please use it as like a secondary source. And they all went, okay, I'm going to use Chatchipuchi to write my paper. Do you have any teachers who effectively managed this? You know, either in their, no. I have the science teacher really tried. She did actually provide, unlike all the other teachers,

she actually provided instruction. Like, hey, here's how we're going to use it. Everybody ignored it. But she did try. All my other teachers just flat out ignored it the whole year, except for the ELA teacher who said we're all writing paper benchmarks, which was a nightmare. That was just... Why was that a nightmare?

Because I'd say for a lot of us, not even including AI, we're all digital people on Chromebooks. We don't know how to write a paper benchmark, which you could argue is its own problem. But then you had a million kids yelling and screaming about that because, God forbid, you have to write a paper. benchmark. So, according to Woody, his English teacher made the students write things out by hand, which actually did keep people from using chat GPT, although Woody thinks that created other problems. Some people have suggested that Woody doesn't need to worry. According to him, he's doing his work legitimately. Assuming that's true and that the other students are using chat GPT, then it will all come out in the wash. He'll actually learn what he's supposed to and the others won't.

And eventually that will be obvious and give him an advantage. Maybe in getting into college, maybe on tests, maybe in life. But Woody doesn't see it that way. In his world, grades matter. Students are under pressure. When students choose to cheat, that can impact how the teachers teach the material, in the pace of learning, which puts even more pressure on the students who are trying to do the work themselves. Well, I mean, it's frustrating.

it's a compounding effect. I'd say at the beginning of the year, there wasn't a lot of students using AI, and I'd say it's shifted as the pacing gets faster than more kids feel like they need it, because they feel like they're going to fail if they don't have it, so it piles on itself. And it also, I was never the fast worker in the class.

I can do the work, but I'm, like, dyslexic anyway, so it takes me forever to do the work anyway. I'd say the number of people not using it, like the number of people holding out and being like, I'm going to do my work legitimately, is going down because it's just, there's no room for, especially in the district where I am, where we're very great grubby.

It's expected, like, you've got to have an A in every class. So everybody's, I got to get that A. I got to get this assignment in a long time. All right, now I'd like to bring Justin Reich back to the program. Justin has studied technology in schools over the decades, and he can help us make sense of the stories we just heard. Welcome back, Justin. Thanks for having me, Jesse.

So the interviews I shared have been done over the past two years, and we're now coming up on three years since ChatGPT was unveiled in November of 2022. So I'm curious what overall reactions you're having as you listen back to these stories. Well, the first thing it makes me think of is something that we've talked about before, which is just this idea of instantaneous arrival. It's so unusual for an event. education technology. I mean, the joke we make sometimes is that, you know, no kid ever dragged their own smart board into a classroom. Typically, education technology was purchased by schools,

and that meant the schools could have at least something of a plan before they gave all their teachers online grade books or they bought all their kids' Chromebooks or they bought all their kids' iPads or whatever else it is. But there is zero time for planning. There's zero time for preparation. You know, Steve Ullett says, this is urgent. There's just, there's something which is happening right now and we need to deal with it. And then schools have really different capacities to deal with that. So an affluent place like Westwood where they probably have recovered pretty well from the pandemic where things are feeling like they're back on track. They probably have plenty of resources to hire substitute teachers. You know, the population of kids they serve have all kinds

of challenges, but not nearly the challenges they might encounter in some of their urban neighborhoods nearby or rural neighborhoods out west. They're in a good place to be able to say, oh, I've got some extra time to be able to manage this. Like, let's get started. Teachers have extra time to be on the working group. Let's get started working on this. For at other places, many, many schools in November 22 in the spring of 2023 were still drowning in the challenges of chronic absenteeism, of learning loss, of school that felt like it really hadn't bounced back yet. And so this new thing shows up and not every school in the country is on the same footing in figuring out how to deal with it. But of course, even if a school doesn't have an institutional

plan to deal with it, every teacher has to deal with it. So Miss O'Neill walks into her classroom and all of her students are using Bing. And she goes, you know, Bing. Bing is the web browser that you use to download Google Chrome so you can never have to use Bing again. Why are all my students using Bing on a Chromebook. None of this makes sense. And it's, what a great story to remind us how significantly and quickly things changed and how there was no choice to postpone this. There was no way to say, ah, well, just buy, maybe we'll buy the smart boards, but we'll

buy them next year, we'll buy them two years after that. Let's just work on other stuff for now. You as an educator have this in your classroom and had to decide what you were going to do. Well, speaking of no option to postpone, I want to play you something that Sam Altman, said about all of this back in 2023. You know that Sam Altman was one of the founders of OpenAI, the company responsible for ChatGPT, and he's the CEO. You may remember he was actually ousted from the company briefly

and then reinstated in this episode they're now calling the blip. And one thing that he's gotten some criticism for is just releasing new versions of Chat Chepti out into the world, arguably without a lot of thought about what impact that might have without a lot of support for institutions like schools that might be impacted by AI. And in 2023, the hosts of the New York Times podcast Hard Fork asked him about that, and this is what he said. You know, one example that I think is instructive because it was the first and the loudest is what happened with chat GPT and education. Days, at least weeks, but I think days after the release of chat GPT, school districts were like falling all over themselves to ban chat GPT.

and that didn't really surprise us. Like that we could have predicted and did predict. The thing that happened after that quickly was, you know, like weeks to months, was school districts and teachers saying, hey, actually we made a mistake. And this is really important part of the future of education. And the benefits far out with the downside. And not only are we unbanned it, we're encouraging our teachers to make use of it in the class. classroom, we're encouraging our students to get really good at this tool because it's going to be

part of the way people live. And then there was like a big discussion about what the kind of path forward should be. And that is just not something that could have happened without releasing. So, Justin, you were paying pretty close attention in 2022 and 2023 when ChatGPT was first unleashed upon schools. Do you think Altman's a count is historically accurate? Well, I actually got to hear Sam Altman give some version of this because he came to MIT not long after November 2022 gave a talk that was facilitated by Sally Cornbluth, our president. And he said something along the lines.

I think the question was something like, you know, where are there big wins for chat GPT? And he was like, well, education's a slam dunk. This is a place where very obviously we're seeing benefits, not really seeing any downsides. things are just immediately improving society. So this is going to be a fast win for us. And yeah, you know, it's delusional. It's not at all connected to what is actually happening in reality in schools. I'm sure some of it is if I built a technology product, I'd be pretty excited to hear the voices of people who are happy with it. You know, people in powerful places don't always have great sources of information about what happens. And everything he says has a kind of factual basis to it.

But it adds up to a kind of orderly picture of what happens that, that to me doesn't really reflect the chaos that educators were experiencing. Also, if you just know something about schools, this idea that, like, as soon as it released, they were all doing something. It's like, no, that's not how schools work. And then really quickly after doing it, they reverse themselves. And you're like, no, you do not under, like, schools are carrier fleets. Schools are supertankers. are super tankers. Like when they turn, they turn slowly and they turn with inertia. And when they go back, it takes a lot of time to move that backwards. But even just in the handful of stories that we heard, we heard from a couple of students, one teacher who said there was nothing happening in their schools. It wasn't being banned. It wasn't being encouraged. Teachers were kind of figuring out on their own what to do with it. And I mean, if you talk to teachers and students, it's not very hard to get stories where you get the sense of like, oh, this is not an unambiguously good thing.

Like, this is making non-key nervous because pretty clearly students are using this to bypass their learning in ways that they shouldn't. Woody is really concerned that his classes are moving faster than they're supposed to because teachers are getting the wrong feedback from students because students instead of doing the work and doing the learning and figuring things out are just popping, pasting questions from chat GPT into their assignments. And what he's trying to, it's telling us, he's trying to do the right thing. And this isn't working here. And even Steve, who's in like the best possible circumstances, a really experienced, really talented

tech director with a really supportive superintendent, really supportive community, cool things happening in their schools, as much good work as he's doing, I think he still feels like that he's just barely taking the first steps that might be needed to get his hands wrapped around this thing. Yeah, and in fact, I actually played that Sam Altman tape for him. And, you know, he, and arguably what Sam Altman describes most closely resembles Westwood and Steve Ullett. Like, of all the people we heard from, his story is the closest to Sam Altman's account of what happened. But this is what he had to say. Not to like highlight Westwood, but when I talk to my peers in neighboring districts,

no one's doing anything. Like, they're just starting to create, think about creating guidelines. So we're kind of just like building the plane, you know, while we fly it. For the next six episodes, we're going to hear stories of building the plane as we fly it. We'll hear from the teachers who are struggling to prevent their students from using chat GPT to bypass learning and thinking. We'll talk with students about why they turn to AI to get their work done and what it feels like

to be falsely accused of using AI. And we'll hear from teachers, students, and school leaders who have found ways to use AI to help them teach or learn. And in our next episode, what even is generative AI? And why does the so-called jagged frontier of this technology make it so challenging when it shows up in schools? It doesn't think. It doesn't understand.

It predicts one word at a time. That's next time on the homework machine. This episode was produced by me, Jesse Dukes. We had editing from Ruxan Draguidi and Alexandra Solomon, reporting and research from Holly McDeed, Natasha Estavis, Andrew Merriweather, and Chris Bagg. Sound design and music supervision by Stephen Jackson. Production support from Yebuji.

Data analysis from Mani Noghese Namani and Manasseh Kudumu. Special thanks to Josh Sheldon, Camilla Lee, Liz Hutner, and Eric Klopfer. Administrative support from Jessica Rondon. The research and reporting you heard in this episode was supported by the Spencer Foundation, the Keport Foundation, the Jamil World Education Lab, the Social and Ethical Responsibility of Computing Initiative at MIT, and the Raise Initiative, responsible AI for social empowerment and education also at MIT. And we had support from Google's Academic Research Awards program. The Homework Machine is a production of the Teaching Systems Lab, Justin Reich Director.

The lab is located at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, more commonly known to the world as MIT. That was The Homework Machine from MIT's Teach Lab podcast, and it's out now. You can find the whole series wherever you get your podcasts. We'll be back next week with a brand new episode of Close All Tabs. Support for KQED Podcasts comes from Star One Credit Union. Give your savings account the love it deserves. When you keep your money with Star 1, you keep more of your money. Star 1 Credit Union in your best interest.

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