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?
I think that particular cat is well and truly out of the bag. I do think that perhaps students need to be enocouraged to read through the information and put it into their own words. Then a teacher would know how thoroughly they understand their work. Or not.
ReplyDeleteMy daughter is an English Teacher and the students try AI to write their papers all the time. So frustrating for her.
ReplyDeleteHumans have reached the peak of our evolution. We are no longer challenged by the world. We have invented all labor saving devices and now we have invented a machine to think for us. We are now in the devolving stage getting weaker and dumber.
ReplyDeleteI fear you're absolutely right, Ellen.
DeleteIt's truly a problem. I think students have to be internally motivated to write their own stuff/ do their homework.
ReplyDeleteI haven't read that article yet but now I'm going to -- pronto! The thinking at the school where I work is that AI is unstoppable. Trying to keep it out is a futile exercise. So instead we teach students how to use it to assist them in research and in framing questions, but not in writing their final papers. I have mixed feelings about it and I never use AI myself, but I suppose it is the wave of the future, for better or worse.
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