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ChatGPT has announced a new Study Mode that aims to encourage students to understand their homework rather than taking a shortcut. The idea is to help students through a problem, step by step. 
As artificial intelligence chatbots become increasingly common and inexpensive to access, students are often using them to cheat when it comes to doing homework and this, in turn, is discouraging critical thinking.
“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. Study mode is designed to be engaging and interactive, and to help students learn something—not just finish something,” said the company in a statement.
In January 2023, just a few months after OpenAI introduced ChatGPT, a survey of 1,000 college students found that 89% of them had used the chatbot to help with homework assignments. 
According to OpenAI’s ‘look at college student ChatGPT adoption in the US’ paper, “over one-third of 18- to 24-year-olds” use “ChatGPT, and among these users, over one-quarter of their messages are about learning, tutoring, and school work”.
Study Mode will help OpenAI market its tools for personalized learning rather than cheating.
An OpenAI demonstration highlighted what happens when a student asks Study Mode for an answer about an academic subject like game theory. The chatbot first asks what the student wants to know and then tries to come up with an exchange. For example, the chatbot responds to a prompt asking for help with understanding Bayes’ theorem by asking the user what level of maths they are comfortable with and what their goal is.
The new mode has been designed in collaboration with teachers, scientists and education experts.
“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,” said Robbie Torney, senior director of AI programmes at Common Sense Media.
Study Mode is arriving days after OpenAI CEO Sam Altman suggested that AI may change the future of education. In an interview on the This Past Weekend podcast with Theo Von, Altman said his child will “probably not” go to college. 
“You and I never grew up in a world that didn’t have computers. To us computers always existed. It was kind of new but they were always around…. My kid will never be smarter than AI.” Altman, like Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, dropped out of Stanford University.
The problem with chatbots is they are as good or bad as the material they have been trained on. Usually chatbots are not trained exclusively on academic textbooks or other approved materials. It also draws on explanations from Reddit and Tumblr, which makes the foundation flawed. The large language models could be taught on models that are completely flawed.
Further, if students want to take a shortcut, nothing can stop them. But there is no doubt that Study Mode will encourage students to take the right path rather than shortcuts. 
Key features of Study Mode include interactive prompts, scaffolded responses (information is organized into easy-to-follow sections that highlight the key connections between topics) and knowledge checks (quizzes and open-ended questions, along with personalized feedback to track progress).
“The research landscape is still taking shape on the best ways to apply AI in education. OpenAI is enabling further research on learning and AI through various partners in its NextGenAI initiative, and working with experts from the SCALE Initiative at Stanford University’s Accelerator for Learning to study and share how AI tools influence learning outcomes,” said OpenAI.

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