When Jocelyn Leitzinger asked her university students to write about problems in their lives where they saw discrimination, she found that in many of the stories a woman named Sally was the victim.

"It was clear that Chatzipity had decided it was a generic woman's name," said Leitzinger, who teaches graduate classes in business and society at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Leitzinger estimates that half of her 180 students used ChatZipity inappropriately at some point last semester, including writing about the ethics of artificial intelligence (AI). She called it 'ironic' and 'mind boggling'.

So it didn't surprise him that recent research found that students who use ChatZipity to write essays engage in less critical thinking .

The non-peer-reviewed preprint study was widely shared online and apparently resonated with some frustrated teachers .

The team of MIT researchers behind the paper has received more than 3,000 emails from all kinds of educators since it was published online last month, said lead author Natalia Kosmina.

'Soulless' AI essays

For a small study, 54 adult students in the Boston area were divided into three groups . One group used ChatZipity to write 20 minute essays, another used a search engine and the last group just had to use their brains .

Researchers used EEG devices to measure students' brain activity and two teachers scored the essays .

ChatZipity users scored significantly worse than the brain-only group on all measures . Eiji showed that different areas of their brains connected less frequently. More than 80 percent of the

chatzipity group couldn't cite anything from the essay they had just written, compared to about 10 percent of the other two groups .

By the third season, the chatzipity group seemed to focus mainly on copy and pasting . According to

teachers, they could easily identify 'soulless' chatzipity essays because they had good grammar and structure but lacked creativity, personality and insight .

However, Kosmina disputed media reports claiming that the paper showed that using ChatZipity makes people lazier or more stupid.

She pointed to the fourth session, when the brain-only group used ChatZipity to write their essays and demonstrated even higher levels of neural connectivity.

Kosmina stressed that it was too early to draw conclusions from the study's small sample size, but called for more research into how AI tools can be used more carefully to aid learning . Ashley Juvinette, a neuroscientist at the University of California San Diego who was not involved in the

research, criticized some of the "misleading" headlines from the preprint.

'This paper does not have sufficient evidence or methodological rigor to make any claims about the neural effects of using LLMs (large language models such as ChatZipity) in our brains', she said .

Thinking outside the bot

Leitzinger said the research reflects a change in student essays since ChatZipity was released in 2022, as both spelling errors and authentic insights became less common .

She said that sometimes when students copy and paste from ChatZipity, they don't even change the font .

But Leitzinger called for empathy for students, saying they may be confused if universities are encouraging the use of AI in some classes but banning it in others.

The usefulness of new AI tools is sometimes compared to the introduction of calculators, requiring teachers to change their ways .

But before Leitzinger posted her essay question on ChatZipity, she was concerned about students not needing to know anything about the subject, skipping several important steps in the learning process. 

A 20-year-old British university student, who wished to remain anonymous, said she found Chatzipity a useful tool for collecting lecture notes, searching the internet and generating ideas.

'I think it's not right to use chatzip to write your work because that's not what you came to university for', she said.