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Friday
One of the benefits of being retired teacher is that I don’t have to grapple with the problems posed by ChatGPT, which is currently the worry of professors everywhere. An artificial intelligence program that can spit out custom-made essays takes plagiarism to a whole new level.
According to Wikipedia, Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer “enables users to refine and steer a conversation towards a desired length, format, style, level of detail, and language.” A philosophy colleague at Messiah University informs me that it is scaringly effective at mimicking the kinds of essays professors assign. One can even set the level, from kindergarten to graduate study. Sometimes he has had to check footnoted references—which appear to be actual references but are in fact bogus—to realize the essay is machine produced.
In other words, this Shel Silverstein poem does not do justice to such machines. Nevertheless, I share it to bring a little humor into the conversation. My professor son Tobias Wilson-Bates, to whom I used to read Silverstein’s poems, reminded me of it:
The Homework Machine
By Shel Silverstein
The Homework Machine,
Oh, the Homework Machine,
Most perfect
contraption that’s ever been seen.
Just put in your homework, then drop in a dime,
Snap on the switch, and in ten seconds’ time,
Your homework comes out, quick and clean as can be.
Here it is— ‘nine plus four?’ and the answer is ‘three.’
Three?
Oh me . . .
I guess it’s not as perfect
As I thought it would be.
Toby once joked that it seems like a tremendous waste of money and effort to create a machine designed to generate first-year-student essays. But of course, it can do a lot more.
From my pedagogical perspective, the problem with ChatGPT is that tremendous learning and brain growth come from grappling with the different stages of writing an essay, from the “shitty rough draft” (Anne Lamott’s phrase) to the polished final product. Putting aside the ethical issue of passing along someone else’s work—or something else’s work—as your own, the whole purpose of education is undermined when all you have to do is push a button. It’s like watching an exercise video in lieu of doing the actual exercises. The discovery process that comes from interpreting a work of lit is circumvented.
In my own teaching, because I insisted that the students had to have something at stake in their essays, I encouraged them to find personal application in the works they chose. Often they responded with remarkable insights, both into the works and into their lives. I am told, however, the Chat GPT can fabricate seemingly authentic encounters with poems. I think of the George Burns quote: “The key to success is sincerity. If you can fake that you’ve got it made.”
Toby, who teaches many non-traditional students at Georgia Gwinnett College, has his students do a lot of writing in class, which is one way of addressing the issue. My Messiah colleague takes it on more directly, having the students analyze ChatGPT responses. In other words, the new challenges posted by AI are prompting teachers to become more creative.
The days of such machines messing up the answer to “nine plus four,” however, are long gone.
