Will ChatGPT Be the Death of Writing? No.

Like everyone else in Ed World, I’ve been playing with OpenAI’s new tool, ChatGPT, sometimes with excitement and sometimes with dread. I asked it to compare Bertolt Brecht’s verfremdungseffekt with Antonin Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty. Done. I asked it to summarize the core principles of trial practice for attorneys. Done. I asked it to write me a villanelle about eggplants. Done. The poem was crap, to be honest, but as the old, Russian saying about the dancing bear goes, the impressive thing is that it can do it at all.

Plenty of folks in our world are terrified of this new use of artificial intelligence, convinced that it will make original student writing impossible, and the classic, five-paragraph essay obsolete. If it was difficult to catch a student plagiarizing before, now it will be impossible, as ChatGPT is synthesizing original text out of myriad sources, not cutting and pasting from, say, Wikipedia.

Should we be afraid? No. But we should certainly be looking at what we’ve been doing and the expectations we’ve been setting for our students. This is not the first time students have leapt at the opportunity to take shortcuts (ethical or otherwise) to deliver work product to their teachers. Instead of agonizing over how we can shut down this new tool, shouldn’t we be asking ourselves why students are looking for ways to take shortcuts and have someone or something else do their work for them?

Perhaps your response will be something like, “children are horrible, amoral animals who look for any chance to take advantage of adults and avoid work.” Understandable. We’ve all been there. But let’s attempt a more positive outlook and see where it gets us.

Children like to learn. Children want to know things. This is undeniable. Humans are born experimenting, inquiring, testing the world around them to understand how it works. Before we have language, we are asking questions. Why do babies put everything in their mouths, even when they’re not teething? Because taste and touch are two of their five senses, and they use everything at their disposal to figure out WHAT IS THIS THING I HAVE AND WHAT DOES IT DO?

To be blunt about it, school can either cultivate this innate inquisitiveness or squelch it. Sometimes it does a little of both. At any rate, there’s no reason to assume that children would not want to express themselves in writing and share what they are thinking or what they have learned. If they’ve come to see writing as a chore, it may be because we have presented it as a chore. If they see writing as “work product” rather than a demonstration of the cool things they know, they will naturally find ways to deliver that product with a minimum of effort. Who wouldn’t? And, to push it further, if they see all of school as an exercise in “getting things done” rather than “knowing things”—in other words, if compliance is all they think we care about and want from them—they will find the easiest and most efficient way to comply. As would we. As would anyone. So: if the most important thing about an essay is that it gets turned in on time and gets a good grade, well…what’s the best way of accomplishing that goal?

What if we did a better job of framing the goal of an assignment—and school in general—as gaining knowledge and understanding? What if a student truly felt that knowing things was the goal? If that was what school really felt like to students, the idea of offloading all of one’s work to an AI engine would feel counterproductive. Sure, the bot would get the essay done—but the student would be left knowing nothing. What would be the point?

As I was pondering all of this, I remembered something I had seen in a small town in the Republic of Slovakia, 30 years ago, when I was teaching English. In that town, and perhaps in the country as a whole, there were no standardized tests to close out a student’s K-12 journey and validate their learning before sending them off to college. What this town had, instead, was a series of public demonstrations. Once classes ended, the school was turned over to the seniors, their families, and a group of Important Adults, including the school administrators, the teachers, and local dignitaries like the mayor. Everyone dressed up. Families brought food and drink. Students took turns, individually, coming into various room and facing various sets of adults sitting behind long tables, and then they had to…well, basically, they had to perform their learning, one academic subject at a time. Questions were thrown at them, and they had to stand and deliver. They had to engage in discussion and sometimes debate with members of the adult community and show that they were ready to join that community’s ranks. It was more than an assessment; it was a rite of passage.

Ted Sizer, in his books, Horace’s Compromise and Horace’s School, and in his work with the Coalition of Essential Schools, talked about moving from traditional tests to “exhibitions” of knowledge, complex projects designed to enable students to demonstrate what they had learned in grounded, real-world ways. Surely, there are ways to craft assignments and assessment projects in such a way as to require (and require documentation of) independent thinking and planning, so that no AI engine can do all of the work for students. Surely, there are ways to liberate student writing from mere compliance and make it something students want to do—to express who they are and to show off what they know. If we succeed at that, then ChatGPT and whatever comes after it simply become tools for accessing and organizing information—not as an end-product in itself, but as raw material for something more authentic and meaningful.

If you care about the subject you teach, there’s nothing more heartbreaking than suspecting (or flat-out knowing) that students have passed your class but have left your room not really knowing anything new or important—or that whatever they have learned is so superficial, so fleeting, that the knowledge will sift through their fingers and blow away on the wind. Let’s look at ChatGPT as a challenge, instead of a threat. Let’s look at it as an opportunity to do better, to ask for more, and to stop letting, “I got it done” be the highest good in our schools.