This commentary is by George Lonecker of Middlesex County.
I wanted to see how easy it would be for students to use artificial intelligence to replace their own minds. It's been several years since I retired, and AI has made great progress.
ChatGPT (Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer) is a chatbot developed by OpenAI. Launched in 2022, AI is the fastest growing software application in history, with 100 million users and a value of $80 billion.This is just one of several AI programs
During my career, I taught English, geography, history, and government at Vermont Technological University (now Vermont State University, VTSU). After learning what kind of assignments teachers would give and how they would be graded, I gave the AI a task. I signed up and got ChatGPT working.
I gave the chat a topic about US history. The chat was about “John Adams: A Statesman's Legacy in the American Presidency,'' which he churned out in 1,000 words in less than 30 seconds. This essay did a better job of addressing the issues and problems of the second president's life and legacy than most of my former students. So I tried a president who doesn't have a best-selling biography, a movie, or a national historical park. I introduced the chat to the campaign of our ninth president, William Henry Harrison, who died a month after he took office. Again, the chat was almost instantaneous. I could have been more critical of Harrison bragging about killing Native Americans, but the essay mentions his slogan “Tipecanoe and Tyler too” and certainly deserves an A-. Chat accelerated U.S. history.
Millions of college students from Alabama to Wyoming study U.S. history and write essays about past presidents. Maybe some Vermont topics will interrupt the chat, or at least make her think a little more. I asked Chat to write an essay about how Vermont Sen. Randy Bullock (R-Franklin) defies political characterization. She did pretty well in her 30 seconds, but missed that Bullock served as state auditor and supported LGBTQ rights. Still, Chat at least got her B+. Perhaps someone who is no longer in the office might pause the chat. I asked her to write about former state Sen. Scudder Parker's Democratic loss in the 2006 Vermont gubernatorial race. My AI friend was just as quick to write a bunch of chatty essays about this bizarre, precedent-setting campaign. Chat knew more about Vermont history and politics than most Vermonters. It was A essay.
I was about to tell my friends who were still in the classroom to stop class and let the chat take over, but I decided to try one last time, this time with poetry, something I covered in English Comprite. did. The essay on Emily Dickinson's poetry was great and had lots of pertinent quotes. For our final assignment, we asked Chat to write a free poem about flowers and hummingbirds. She was just terrible and didn't follow directions on her assignments. Perhaps poetry is too subjective for AI.
Erica Nichols Fraser, VTSU Johnson Coordinator of Writing and Humanities. “As a poet and literary scholar, I usually find that creative writing written by chat GPT/AI is generally very stilted and stilted, with little emotion or originality.” , there are awkwardness and downright mistakes. ”
“AI companies are currently making a big push to create more 'human-like' essays,” said Mary Findley, a professor in the Department of Literature and Writing at VTSU Randolph College. …For those who teach English, this is terrifying. …We are already dealing with a texting generation that has no idea how to construct sentences with proper capitalization and punctuation. ”
Author Kim Ward, who teaches English part-time at Norwich University, says, “The biggest way teachers are working to address the issue of submitted AI-generated work is to encourage students to take a personal approach to their subjects.'' I think it's about creating a foothold so that we have to speak in public.” Give answers through small assignments and write a paper. Chat GPT is difficult to answer if it doesn't exist on the internet. ”
The faculty I asked agreed with this approach that I used when teaching technical writing, reducing the chance of cheating using chat. However, cheating on the types of assignments used in many classes, like what I did in chat, is surprisingly easy to avoid. AI is adept at changing the structure of a sentence to the extent that the essay is no longer the same.
Tracking AI-generated fraud takes time. Full-time faculty have many essays to grade and are expected to serve on committees and publish. Part-time instructors often hold other jobs as well. Teachers don't want to be plagiarism police, they want to teach and write. Giving graded assignments in writing classes is a partial solution. In history classes, it would be easier to just assign a test without assigning an essay.
I have spent years teaching students how to research, organize ideas, read, write, and think about problems. It would mean a lot if students could simply log into her AI chatbot and complete a large portion of the lesson in just a few clicks.