Can Writing Be Taught in the Age of AI?
As a new school year gets underway, I was thoroughly bummed out by a recent Atlantic article.
Ian Bogost
I work with words. Pretty much always have. I love them, and I love the craft of putting them together to make arguments or essays or articles or novels.
I help college students work with their writing. It’s the third year of ChatGPT on campus, and it’s hard to describe the suspicion and distrust the technology has bred.
I don’t think about it so much in the realm of “cheating,” but I think about all those times that my assignments piled up and my priorities out of whack and I realized something was due in less than an hour and just had to vomit up something, anything, so as not to fail the assignment.
Was that the best use of my college dollars? Most assuredly not. But was there still value in it? I think so. It wasn’t so dissimilar to times writing assignments in a class, where the work you’d done, the things you’d read, needed to be recalled and compiled quickly in a coherent piece of writing. It wasn’t going to win any prize, but its very shagginess was, in retrospect, a mark of the (admittedly imperfect) human behind the words.
ChatGPT erases that scenario entirely. Of course students will continue to forget about assignments and need to produce something in a rush, but the technology can do it in literal seconds.
That’s hardly the most concerning use of ChatGPT, but I remember talking to a professor in the Honors College at Mizzou who said the problem came into play whenever we outsource our thinking. I think that’s exactly right.