Younger Gen Zers are adopting OpenAI’s AI-powered chatbot, ChatGPTfor school work, ACCORDING in a new survey by the Pew Research Center. But it’s not clear they’re fully aware of the technology’s pitfalls.

In a follow-up to its 2023 poll on youth ChatGPT use, Pew asked ~1,400 US-based teens ages 13 to 17 whether they used ChatGPT for homework or other school-related tasks. Twenty-six percent said they had, double the number two years ago.

More than half of the teenagers who responded to the poll – 54% – said they thought it was acceptable to use ChatGPT for research on new topics. Twenty-nine percent said the AI ​​tool was acceptable for math problems, and 18% said using ChatGPT to write essays was acceptable.

Considering the ways that ChatGPT can be shortened, the results may be cause for alarm.

ChatGPT aren’t you good at math? — and it’s not the most reliable source the facts. A new one study Investigating whether leading AI can pass a doctoral-level test has historically found that GPT-4othe default AI model that powers ChatGPT, can only answer questions slightly more accurately than a human randomly guessing.

The same study found that ChatGPT is weakest in areas, such as social mobility and the geopolitics of Sub-Saharan Africa, possibly related to the demographics of teenagers who report using it at school. In Pew’s poll, Black and Hispanic teens are more likely than white teens to say they use ChatGPT for school-related work.

Research is unsurprisingly mixed with the pedagogical impact of ChatGPT. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania found that Turkish high school students with access to ChatGPT performed worse on a math test than students without access. In a separate studythe researchers observed that German students using ChatGPT were able to find research materials more quickly but tended to synthesize materials less proficiently than their peers who did not use ChatGPT.

In a separate poll last year by Pew, a quarter of public K-12 teachers said that using AI tools like ChatGPT in education does more harm than good. A survey by the Rand Corporation and the Center on Reinventing Public Education, on the other hand, found that only 18% of K-12 teachers use AI in their classrooms.

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