If you have children in primary or secondary school, chances are that one of their teachers will be using ChatGPT in some way, shape or form. Many teachers use it for planning lessons, which is a shame, but at least doesn't directly violate children's privacy. However, once ChatGPT is used for grading or in student assignments, that data is no longer private, and is likely being used to train ChatGPT or similar Large Language Models.

Consider using this template to send an email to your children's teacher(s) to voice your concerns about using AI in the classroom. This template was written by Anthony Moser and is provided under the terms of the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoAI licence, so feel free to edit it in any way you see fit, share it with your friends, include it in a blog post or on social media, whatever. For this use, we do not require you to attribute this work to Politechs, but of course we'd appreciate it if you give us a shout-out and link back to this page. 🙂

Email template

Dear [TEACHER],

I want to make sure we're on the same page for the rest of the year, because I was surprised and disappointed to hear that you uploaded student projects to ChatGPT.

We have always found [SCHOOL] to be a place that encourages students to express themselves creatively, to be responsible and aware of how their actions affect others, and to be intellectually honest – doing their own work, rather than copying from others.

I know ChatGPT has been heavily marketed as an educational tool, but everything about it is the opposite of those values. AI tools are built by training models on stolen work [ PERMALINK ]. They have huge and terrible environmental costs [ PERMALINK ], because their data centers generate enormous amounts of pollution [ PERMALINK ] and are cooled with drinking water [ PERMALINK ]. They're also incredibly dangerous: tools like ChatGPT have taught children how to start fires [ PERMALINK ] and even encouraged them to commit suicide [ PERMALINK ].

And in a classroom setting, it has been shown to reduce students' ability to think critically [ PERMALINK ], and worse yet, it teaches young students that a machine can express their ideas better than they can. I told [ CHILD ] I was interested in seeing what they had to draw, and my heart sank when they told me "but I can't draw that pretty." Children deserve to draw what they imagine.

These environmental, ethical, and pedagogical concerns are why I don't want [ CHILD ] to use AI tools (or for you to use them on their behalf). For the same reasons, I respectfully ask that you stop using them in your classroom.

If you do plan to use AI this year, please send home a permission slip requesting consent. There are important privacy concerns when you upload student work into a for-profit service like ChatGPT.

Thank you,
[ PARENT ]

Privacy in the European Union

If this is happening in the EU, it is almost certainly a violation of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), as student names are classified as personal data, which may not be disclosed to a third party without explicitly being included in a privacy policy and disclosed to users. Furthermore, the school must have a data processing agreement in place with each third party to which personal data is transmitted.

Unless the school has such an agreement with OpenAI and discloses to parents what personal data is being entered into ChatGPT prompts (for example, your child's name or other personally identifiable data that may be included in certain types of assignments, such as their parents' names, their address, etc), use of ChatGPT by teachers violates the GDPR as soon as they enter so much as a single name into a prompt.