Is ChatGPT’s Study Mode a Game Changer for Students or Just Hype? Here’s What Parents Need To Know

It seems like generative AI is everywhere lately: in our Google search engines, in our phones, and especially in our classrooms. Students have always gotten creative when it comes to finding ways to cheat — but AI platforms like ChatGPT have made it incredibly easy. Just type in a prompt and it’ll pop out a fully written essay; ask it a math problem and it’ll immediately solve it (and show work if you need that too!). Now, Open AI wants to get on parents’ good side, which is why it launched a brand-new Study Mode to try to help students learn instead of cheat. Here’s what parents need to know about this new feature.

 What Is ChatGPT Study Mode?

Instead of just typing in a prompt and getting an immediate answer, ChatGPT Study Mode is designed to get students to actually work through a problem step by step.

“When students engage with study mode, they’re met with guiding questions that calibrate responses to their objective and skill level to help them build deeper understanding,” Open AI said in a statement.  Study mode is designed to be engaging and interactive, and to help students learn something—not just finish something.”

The tech company worked with teachers, scientists, and pedagogy experts to develop Study Mode. It’s supposed to encourage active participation, manage cognitive load, proactively develop metacognition and self-reflection, foster curiosity, and provide actionable and supportive feedback, according to OpenAI.

“Instead of doing the work for them, study mode encourages students to think critically about their learning. Features like these are a positive step toward effective AI use for learning. Even in the AI era, the best learning still happens when students are excited about and actively engaging with the lesson material,” Robbie Torney, Senior Director of AI Programs at Common Sense Media, said in a statement.

Should Parents Be Wary?

It sounds great, but there are still many flaws with the software that parents need to be aware of. OpenAI gave a demonstration of Study Mode, where it was revealed that Study Mode is “not a tool trained exclusively on academic textbooks and other approved materials — it’s more like the same old ChatGPT, tuned with a new conversation filter that simply governs how it responds to students,” reported MIT Technology Review.

This means that the AI has studied textbooks and academic papers, but it has also read everything about the subject posted on Reddit, Tumblr, and other parts of the web. Students can ask anything they would normally ask on ChatGPT, per the outlet, and Study Mode won’t do anything to stop students from leaving Study Mode and finding the answer like normal on regular ChatGPT.

In the Technology subreddit, tech experts who tried Study Mode chatted about the program’s flaws. One person asked it a question on a topic they knew the answers to and found that Study Mode “still spoonfeeds you the answers.” They wrote, “I asked it a question and it just gave me the answer. No leading questions or anything. The only nod to ‘study mode’ is that it asked me a follow-up question. But one predicated on the wrong answer it gave me to my question.” So it gave the answer and asked a follow up question on a wrong answer, which means it’s not actually more reliable or better at all.

“The same problems with every chatbot,” someone else said. “Confidently wrong answers. Corrections give you new wrong answers. If you don’t already know the answers you can’t verify that it’s wrong.”

Others pointed out that due to the nature of chatbots, the guardrails and protections “only work up to a point.” Students simply have to ask them to give them the answers, and it will.   “Jailbreaking them with the right prompts to do whatever is incredibly easy to do,” one person said.

What Do Teens Think About AI?

Last month, SheKnows did a survey of 25 teens ages 14-20 and found that 84 percent interact most with AI for help with homework, with 40 percent saying they use AI for school-related purposes between two and five times per week. And even though 88 percent of teens agree that using AI is “definitely cheating” when it comes to in-person quizzes or exams, only 12 percent consider it cheating to use AI to help do homework.

We previously talked to members of our SheKnows Teen Council to get more insights. Clive, 16, told us, “I think that teachers don’t really realize how much you can use AI for yet so I get a lot of essays and work to do at home that you can easily use AI on.”

Sophie, 17, told us, “I see almost in every one of my classes, most people like, if we’re working on an assignment, will just copy and paste it in ChatGPT. So I feel like I definitely use it a lot less than my classmates around me, just because I feel like it’s become so normalized in my school, which is not good.”

“I usually use AI when it comes to the more technical side of stuff, like math and science and physics and that sort of thing,” Lilla, 17, said. “For the art and writing side of stuff, I’m a very artistic person and I’m very against using AI for that kind of thing because it really takes away people’s creativity.”

In another chat with our Teen Council as part of our video series, Teens at a Table, Clive admitted about his AI use, “I fully feel like it’s cheating, but also, like, I completely use it for everything.”

It’s concerning, especially because research has already started to show the impact of AI on our kids’ brains. One study compared students who were asked to use ChatGPT to write SAT essays compared to those who wrote them with no tools and those who used them with the help of Google. They found that those who used ChatGPT had lower brain engagement and “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.”

This new move by ChatGPT may not solve the problem of kids over-relying on AI in homework, but it could open the conversation for parents to have with their teens. With encouragement to use AI to enhance learning rather than replace it, and to question the accuracy of AI-generated content, we can help kids to stay aware and keep learning, even as AI continues to surge in popularity.

Before you go, check out where your favorite celeb parents are sending their kids to college.