[koreth1]

One place I think it can be useful is in shortening the feedback loop for learning outside the classroom.

As an example (not K-12!) my wife is learning Japanese. She's taking a class and the teacher gives her homework, but she also studies on her own, including doing exercises in the textbooks beyond the ones the teacher assigns.

Sometimes she'll answer a question, look it up in the answer key, and find she got it wrong. Previously, she had to wait until the next class and find time to ask the teacher to help her understand her mistake.

But I showed her how to use the ChatGPT phone app to get an explanation right away. She doesn't even have to type it in: just take a picture of the quiz (which is all in Japanese, not English) and ask, "Why is the answer to question 7 'C' instead of 'D'?" And she gets back a detailed explanation of the differences between the two answers and why "C" is a better choice, complete with fresh example sentences and breakdowns of what they mean.

Hallucinations are a risk: she could get back a bogus explanation. So far, that hasn't happened, though. She isn't a total beginner and knows enough to be able to tell whether the explanation makes sense. Each time, her reaction has been something like, "Oh, right, I forgot about that," not, "What? Never heard of that." She also tried it on a couple of questions she'd run by her teacher previously, and got back roughly the same explanations the teacher had given her.

In theory she could just ask it for the answer rather than for an explanation of why her answer was wrong, and it would happily give her a usually-correct response. In her case, that's not a problem because her only goal is to actually learn the language. Cheating would serve no purpose at all. But for a K-12 student who mostly cares about getting a good grade, obviously that's going to be a big temptation.