Students are already widely using generative AI for their school work. It is difficult to determine just how many students are using generative AI for their work. One widely-cited study from March 2023 showed that about 22% of college and graduate students admit to using AI for their assignments. The same survey found that about half of all students believe that using AI on assignments constitutes cheating. Another study of K-12 teachers and students in February 2023 found that 40% of teachers and 22% of students used ChatGPT at least once a week. Another study of middle and high school students done in May 2023 found that 58% of students had used AI.

Anecdotally, our own students have reported that they are regularly using generative AI in their summer jobs. One student wrote this to several of his professors:

I am putting together documents (half knowing what they mean) in 15-20 minutes which the PARTNERS here say they take 2 hours to do. When they check it, they can edit in 5-10 minutes and it’s done. When they do the initial inputting, the whole process is 20 minutes. That’s a 5/6 reduction in time, and this thing has been out for less than a year. Lexis is developing a plug-in now; when that’s done, I think we’re looking at 5-10% of the time to do nearly all formulaic legal work compared to a person. Cover letters? Toss in the job description and your resume, 2 minutes to edit, done.

One of our graduates who works at the Department of Justice said that, anecdotally, attorneys use it for many things. It’s more useful for more discrete legal issues than for larger or more complex questions. And it is always necessary to check every citation you receive from a chatbot.

Based on other reports, students seem to be using chatbots in several ways.

Help on research projects. Chatbots do a lot of the work for a research project.
Generate a thesis or general claim. For research projects, students can ask a chatbot to generate several possible thesis statements.
Organize the project: Ask the chatbot to outline the project step by step. Students can tell the chatbot how long the project needs to be, what kinds of materials it should consider, and who the audience is.
Provide details on each paragraph. The chatbot can tell the student what each paragraph (or section) of the paper should cover.
Plan conversations. Students can ask a chatbot something like the following: I need to ask my professor how to
ChatPDF. Using ChatPDF, students can upload a PDF (like, for example, a casebook) and then use a chatbot to interact only with that document.
Custom chatbots. It is possible for sophisticated users to create their own custom chatbot. This could include the casebook, their notes, and any other materials. Then when the student interacted with the chatbot, all the responses would be based on course materials.