Last week some Artificial Intelligence technology called ChatGPT was introduced, and it’s got a lot of people freaking out.
The Atlantic had a headline that asks, “Is the College Essay Dead?” A Forbes headline says, “Teachers Fear ChatGPT Will Make Cheating Easier Than Ever.” The website asks, “Could an AI bot be writing students’ homework?”
The reason there’s a bit of alarm right now is that this technology can write for you. You can put in a prompt or ask a question and within seconds the AI will give you a response with sometimes startling accuracy. A professor at Amherst College graded an essay this program wrote, and even gave it an A. And it’s not plagiarizing other people’s work, it’s synthesizing writing from all over the internet and composing it in an original way. You can see why this raises the hackles on this English teacher's neck.
Writing can be hard work, and if you can bypass that hard work by using artificial intelligence why would you? Why wouldn’t students just cheat by using this?
This is going to cause a shakeup in education, but isn’t that kind of the nature of education?
Did you know in the 1970’s when calculators started to become widespread, they were banned in most schools?
And yet, in 1975, they were in 1 of 9 American homes. Meaning you can ban them all you want at school, but they were still being used at home to solve math problems. And within a decade, the College Board was mandating their use on the AP exam, and by 1990 they were being used in every school in the country. And I don’t think this was just educators throwing up their hands and saying, if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. No, if you look at this history, you’ll see it’s because educators realized students can do more complex math with the use of a calculator. But educators first had to figure out how to take advantage of that technology.
So a lot of the worry is that ChatGPT is just going to do all the thinking instead of students having to do it. Instead of doing the research and writing a thoughtful essay comparing the themes of Shakespeare and modern politics, students will just write that prompt into ChatGPT and it’ll kick out a completely original essay on that topic.
That is a legitimate fear. I know when I was in high school, and some of college, that’s what I would have done. But since artificial intelligence didn’t exist when I was in high school, I often BS’d essays like that. I learned quickly in my adolescent years that these types of papers were pretty formulaic. If I could just plug-in surface-level information into the 5 paragraph structure, I could get the grade I needed and move on.
Now, did writing that 5 paragraph, surface-level essay make me a strong writer? Or did it confirm my ability to BS an essay? Because that’s what artificial intelligence largely does. It finds the information and strings it together in a passable way. And if that’s what we’re asking students to do with prompts like that, what’s the point? Why are we wasting their time and ours with something we know isn’t producing better writers or even demonstrating understanding of the material? Because some test says we have to?
We need to adjust what writing in school looks like.
What AI cannot do is mimic a writer’s unique voice. It can’t use personal stories and anecdotes to connect with what students are learning. ChatGPT may be a good writer, but it’s not a great one. Because great writers are original and do something only they can do, which is create from their unique perspective. That’s what we have to teach students to do. That’s what standardized testing, if we’re going to keep that around, needs to be about.
ChatGPT is not going to end English class, but I think it will change it. I think it will force us to examine the work we give to students. We all know that writing 5 paragraph essays is not part of the daily routine for most adults. So maybe it’s time that ship sails off into the sunset. But there’s lots of practical writing we do do in o