Effortpoast time as I grade papers before the holidays:
Many of my peers that fall into the minority of “capable” teachers and /ourguys/ that I chat with regularly are growing increasingly concerned about AI-generated papers (see for example: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/12/chatgpt-ai-writing-college-student-essays/672371/). One of my peers even suggested that this will necessitate the return to handwritten or typewritten papers in order to circumvent the ability of students to create plagiarism free, totally unique papers created by a computer prompt. While I would welcome the return of classical writing that this would inevitably produce, I’m not so certain that it’s entirely productive.
- Non-digital papers are, ironically, harder to detect plagiarism on because I cannot put them through a database and have to depend on my ability to memorize entire passages of academic texts. That would be incredible, but I’ll be the first to admit I’m too retarded for that.
- The ability for good students to retain the ability to research and write digitally is much more efficient when it comes to finding decent (and rare) sources and fixing errors without starting a whole new damned page (anyone who’s ever used a typewriter can commiserate with me on this).
- And most importantly, I’m not convinced that AI writing won’t actually be helpful at weeding out shit students. Anyone willing to shell out for a pre-generated paper with zero novel ideas will immediately wash out once they have to produce something of value in oral exams, practical testing (for STEM), or new research methodology in a field that a computer can’t just fart out (because it can only produce from available data). It’s self-correcting, just on a longer time frame than most people are comfortable allowing when it comes to “getting away” with cheating.
I’m curious to see what the ramifications of this will be outside of my own little bubble of “high school and undergrad classes” that I teach, and would love to know what others think of the potential consequences of this.