You’ve enjoyed the last 20 years you have spent teaching at a dental school near your office. Your interest has always been in biomechanics and materials science, so in addition to clinical supervision in the postdoctoral clinic, you remain responsible for teaching those topics. Your didactic responsibility is not only to the residents, but also includes an elective course for predoctoral dental students. Many of these predoctoral students aspire to specialize in orthodontics, and therefore, they appear to be well motivated to delve into your subject matter. The course is held in seminar fashion, so you certainly get a feel for each student’s communicative skills and preparation for class. The depth of the material in the predoctoral elective is somewhat diluted, but you feel the topic is pertinent and useful for both groups of attendees.
A new exam question you posted this year calls for a list of the differences in properties of nickel-titanium and stainless-steel wires. As the course is elective, your chairperson agrees to a take-home exam. The students pledge not to collaborate and to submit an honest assessment of their knowledge. You give them 2 days to return the exam.
The students submit their exams electronically. For the most part, it seems that you have been effective in communicating your course material. Most students have done well. But there are 2 exams that raise your suspicion that these students’ work might not be their own. Recalling their class participation, their ability to communicate verbally, and their occasional failure to complete your given assignments, something seems amiss. Their answers to your questions seem to be too sophisticated in comparison to their class performance. So you submit your exam questions to an artificial intelligence (AI) platform just to see if there are any parallels between their answers and the AI’s posting. Unfortunately, the AI’s answers and theirs are identical.
There are several concerns emanating from this scenario. The first is an issue of integrity. Consider a study involving an 18-article systematic review in which the authors assessed an evidence-based relationship between college dishonesty and subsequent workplace integrity. They found a direct relationship between these 2 variables. That is, a higher frequency of dishonest behavior that occurred in college was correlated with more frequent occurrence of subsequent dishonesty in the business and professional setting.
Equally concerning is another recent study conducted at the Media Lab of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Investigators recruited 54 students aged 18-39 years as their cohort. The students were divided into 3 groups. All groups were asked to write a series of essays that followed the structure of college entrance exams. One group was told to compose the essays using AI via ChatGPT. Another group was permitted to use the Google search engine. The third group was only permitted to use their own intellectual capabilities without any use of assistance. The brain activity of all 3 groups was assessed via monitoring electroencephalogram activity during each writing episode. In addition, 2 English teachers evaluated the quality of the essays. The study revealed that the students who used ChatGPT assistance had the lowest level of neural, linguistic, and behavioral brainwave activity. The ChatGPT group also became progressively lax over the assessment time of the study, often resorting to copying previous written work when completing subsequent assignments. Yet, the electroencephalogram recordings of the Google search and the independent group displayed brainwaves that correlated with higher levels of creativity and fulfillment from their work.
The orthodontic legacy is one of pride in integrity and skills in reasoning, logic, and critical thinking. There is no question that technical progress is essential, as it is ubiquitous in almost all professions. But nothing, including AI, should ever undermine honesty and the development of the human thinking process anywhere—especially in orthodontics.
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