Banning of C hat GPT from Educational Spaces: A R eddit Perspective (2023)

Abstract: With the introduction of ChatGPT on November 30, 2022, the online sphere was disrupted seemingly overnight, with its ability to generate human-like text and comprehensively answer questions. It has even been lauded as being able to aid in the editing and generation of code. Some schools and online question-and-answer forums, however, have banned its use. In this paper, we use Reddit data to examine the impact that the banning of the AI tool has had online. Our findings indicate that reactions have ranged from skepticism that the ban will work, loss of educational opportunity, to agreement that ChatGPT is not 100 percent accurate in its answers. We postulate that while it may be better to ban it from Question-and-Answer forums, in physical classrooms, while ChatGPT may hinder students from finding their own solutions to problems, it also provides the opportunity for students to critically view answers provided to them by the chatbot, strengthening their digital literacy and critical thinking skills.

## introduction chatgpt was released on november 30, 2022. only a few days later, it disrupted the evaluation of education and how students interact with their assignments. without any reliable tools available to evaluate which submissions were created with chatgpt, new york city (nyc) public schools banned the use of the ai tool by not only students but teachers as well @xcite . as a large language model trained by openai as an interactive chat module to aid in language-related tasks such as answering questions and even aiding in writing code, it has caused concern to learners and educators that it provides easy access to answers with little understand-ing of the topic, in addition to it occasionally confidently providing erroneous or biased responses unbeknownst to the inquirer. in this study, topic modeling will be used to explore online reactions to the nyc ban comparing two different groups: educators and programmers. succinctly put, reactions have mostly been skeptical of the effectiveness of preventing plagiarism and instead, there have been calls for a review and revision of the education system. meanwhile, when chatgpt was banned @xcite on the question-and-answer website for programmers, stackoverflow, reactions seemed more agreeable with the ban, emphasizing its generation of incorrect answers. ## background public sentiment towards chatgpt has been largely positive @xcite . however, the reaction from educators has been more mixed @xcite . even though it has been less than a year since chatgpt has been publicly available, plenty of academic literature on its impact on education exists already, both for and against its inclusion as a tool in education. the mixed reactions from educators include some heralding it as a progressive step into the future leveling the playing field by providing equitable learning opportunities @xcite , and others fearing its potential to reduce analytical and critical thinking skills while promoting academic misconduct @xcite . some researchers believe that the use of chat-gpt in classrooms will increase engagement and interaction and provide a personalized learning experience, but highlight a need for a strong focus on critical thinking skills @xcite . many also worry about not just the generation of wrong information, but also the augmentation of biases that exist in the training data and the risks to pri-vacy and security @xcite . @xcite even pitted stackoverflow and chatgpt against each other in order to determine which platform provides better answers. they found that despite 52% of chatgpt answers containing inaccuracies, users preferred chatgpt's answers due to their comprehensiveness. on the other hand, stackoverflow has often been accused of providing rude and condescending answers to user questions @xcite so it is plausible that the fact that chatgpt does not mock the question is preferable to especially beginner programmers unsure of their own skills despite the risk of providing inaccurate answers. recent studies have also leveraged reddit to collect data on posts discussing the usage of chatgpt, or attempt to apply the ai as an analytical tool in various fields from mental health care, streaming media, content moderation, and applications of such generative ai @xcite @xcite . while this research preceded the introduction of chatgpt, researchers have also found that educators widely use reddit given that the website is able to host a wide variety of topics and spaces, suggesting that its use may be influential for educators @xcite . moreover, in order to distinguish various public sentiments researchers have employed topic analysis. many featured latent dirichlet allocation (lda) topic modeling @xcite , one of the most popular topic modeling approaches. of the many models available, bertopic @xcite , known for its embedding approach, recently emerged to be quite competitive against others. research on twitter data, has evaluated bertopic to be effective compared to top2vec and lda @xcite . many studies have already successfully utilized bertopic to elicit trends and topics from data scraped from the reddit platform @xcite @xcite . ## data and method three reddit threads posted early on in the chat-gpt discourse, @xcite 2023b), 1 (reddit, 2023c) 2 and (reddit, 2023a ) 3 were selected for data collection due to them having the most upvotes, the reddit measure of popularity, about their respective topics, with 28.9k for nyc bans, 6.6k for one stackoverflow thread, and 1.5k votes for another stackoverflow thread, at the point of data collection. a total of 3958 comments were collected from reddit with regards to chatgpt's ban from two different places; new york city public schools and stackoverflow. 2663 comments are from the thread on bans by nyc public schools, while 856 are from the stackoverflow thread with 6.6k upvotes, and 439 are from the stackoverflow thread with 1.5k upvotes. they were collected through praw 7.7.1 via python reddit api (bryce @xcite . data were first preprocessed: comments were separated to form a single list containing strings of sentences for each thread respectively and to fully utilize sentence-transformers @xcite . topic modeling was conducted with bertopic and sentence transformers with the all-minilm-l6-v2 model to get the most out of the sentence embeddings. intertopic distance maps and topic word scores were first generated to gain an initial understanding of how topics were clustered and the relative c-tf-idf scores between and within topics (see appendix). following this, to determine the relationship between topics, and documents within topics, figures 7 , 9 , and 8 were generated. finally, to confirm the results, lda through gensim was utilized as a baseline. to evaluate the number of topics that should be created by the model, coherence scores against the number of topics were calculated for each reddit thread, as 1 reddit. nyc bans students and teachers from using chatgpt | the machine learning chatbot is inaccessible on school networks and devices, due to concerns about negative impacts on student learning, a spokesperson said. https://www. reddit.com/r/technology/comments/103gran/nyc_ bans_students_and_teachers_from_using_chatgpt / 2 reddit. stackoverflow to ban chatgpt generated answers with possibly immediate suspensions of up to 30 days to users without prior notice or warning https: //www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/zhpkk1/ stackoverflow_to_ban_chatgpt_generated_answers.