The school year starts soon for many students, and ChatGPT has announced a new “study mode” that aims to prevent—or at least, encourage against—students taking homework shortcuts.
The mode is designed around the Socratic method, so when activated, OpenAI’s generative AI chatbot rejects direct requests for answers, instead guiding the user with open-ended questions. The new study mode is available to most logged-in users of ChatGPT, including those on the free version.
OpenAI has significantly disrupted the education system over the past few years, with students becoming some of the earliest adopters of ChatGPT. Even so, OpenAI claims the bot is currently an overall boon to learners—if asked to roleplay as a synthetic tutor.
“When ChatGPT is prompted to teach or tutor, it can significantly improve academic performance,” says Leah Belsky, a vice president of education at OpenAI, “but when it’s just used as an answer machine, it can hinder learning.”
The problem is, no matter how engaging ChatGPT’s study mode becomes as OpenAI iterates on this feature, it exists just a toggle click away from ChatGPT, with direct answers (and potential fabrications) about whatever class you’re working on. That could be quite hard to resist for younger users still developing their frontal lobe.
It’s true that students on the hunt for easy ways to avoid engaging with the substance of a course have always had resources available to them, like the CliffNotes series of literature summaries. Still, the immediacy and personalized nature of chatbots feels like an escalation. Multiple AI-focused smartphone apps that can solve homework problems with just a snapshot, like ByteDance’s Gauth, rocket in popularity whenever the school year gets back into session. Many educators have recently raised concerns about the continued, and often secretive, use of AI by students.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman doesn’t buy it. “I remember when I was in school—junior high—Google first came out and all the teachers freaked out,” Altman said on a recent podcast. Similar to the internet and the calculator, Altman’s sees AI as a tool capable of helping you “think better.”
ChatGPT’s study mode is an attempt to foster more thorough engagement on a topic with users by throwing questions back at them and asking for more context about their learning goals. “Instead of giving a very long, drawn out answer up front, it’s first asking you, ‘Hey, what are you trying to optimize for? What’s your current level?’” says Abhi Muchha, who works on the product team at OpenAI.
While the launch of OpenAI’s study mode is more focused on universities, with college students giving their best beta tester testimonials during the press briefing, the company has its attention on an even broader swath of learners—which includes younger students. OpenAI is currently partnering with learning experts from Stanford “to study and share how AI tools, including study mode, influence learning outcomes in areas like K-12 education,” reads the company’s announcement blog. This release comes not too long after the Trump administration’s executive order focused on getting more AI usage into classrooms in the United States.
Even if the initial research that OpenAI participates in about education and AI supports the company’s claims that students learn better with a bot by their side, when it’s used as a tutor rather than an answer generator, I’m still concerned. What are the long-term impacts of turning to an AI tool for guidance with increasing regularity? It’s still unclear if young people, who may grow up constantly asking ChatGPT for help, develop an over-reliance on the software that impedes critical thinking.
So, while ChatGPT’s study mode is designed to guide students through learning material at their level of understanding, the onus remains on users to engage with the software in a specific way, ensuring that they truly understand the material. In the AI age, the hardest challenge of all for students might just be resisting the urge to swap out of study mode, snap a photo of the homework question, and have ChatGPT tell you exactly what you want to hear: the answer.
