I left my English classroom over a decade ago, but long
before that I was feeling the effects of this new-fangled internet. I had
assigned yet another writing piece for one of my International Baccalaureate
classes. As a teacher you become familiar with your students’ writing style and
abilities and what sounds false. I discovered that even back then I only needed
to type a suspicious phrase into Google and I could find the true source. Sure
enough, 75% of one girl’s submission was not her own. And she wasn’t the first
to think that moving words from someone else’s writing into her own was
perfectly fine.
I can’t even imagine trying to combat
this attitude in today’s world.
“The End of the Essay”, an article by Hija Hsu in my latest
issue of The New Yorker gave me one more reason to embrace my retirement from
teaching. It’s about the effect of AI on college writing.
For example, one student interviewed needed
to write a paper for art-history class. His solution was to photograph a museum’s
exhibition, with each painting’s description for gallery goers, and then he
uploaded everything to an AI program, telling it to produce a paper. After telling
AI to tailor it to better answer the professor’s assignment, he submitted the
final version to class and received an A-.
In the future, will anyone be able to
read something, think critically about it, and then write an opinion on it?
Will we all have forgotten how to think?
This morning, I picked up my local
paper and found an article about a Massachusetts professional development
course that some high school teachers are taking this summer.
This $135,000 program is “designed to
provide high school educators with the tools, knowledge and network to bring
artificial intelligence into their classrooms.”
Know thine enemy is one thing but here’s
my question – Is this a Trojan horse? Shouldn’t we be trying harder to keep
artificial intelligence out of our classrooms?
