Generative AI Will Be Exactly as Scary as Higher Education Makes It
Disclaimer: This is not a “gotcha” piece where I reveal at the end that I used Chat GPT to write this blog.
In the few weeks after Chat GPT made its public debut, I saw a lot of chatter about how its use would irrevocably change higher education—writing programs would crumble, theses would become meaningless, and academic integrity would be a thing of the past. As someone who attended college a while ago, and who now works in higher education, my response to this is, “Great! What took so long?”
It’s been a minute (or 15 years) since I started college. How is it that today’s students are still writing and submitting work using the same process I used in 2008—drafting a paper in Word, using the built-in grammar/spell-check, and then submitting it online to be run through a plagiarism checker (usually Turnitin). How has there been no substantial updates to the composition process in 15 years? And, as a fun bonus, this long period of stagnation has given us more than a decade to get nice and entrenched in the established process. The grooves in this pavement are 15 years deep. And yet, as those pesky classicists love to remind us, Heraclitus once said, “The only constant in life is change,” which brings us to:
Things to consider before freaking out about the future of Chat GPT in Higher Education
Innovation is part of human life.
Every day, all day, we benefit from innumerable discoveries and inventions. But for every one of these super rad developments, something else becomes obsolete—that’s just how it works. This morning, I replied to emails, not telegrams; when I need my husband to get something at the store, I send him a text message, not a carrier pigeon (though, I’ll be honest, this method of communication appeals to me). So, now we have Chat GPT, and, as usual, we have a choice. You don’t have to embrace change; you can try to stop your students and faculty from using it. You can also demand that they use feather quills instead of pens—but why? Frankly, “It’s hard to learn something new,” is a lame excuse. It’s also not a reason we’d let students use, so let’s hold ourselves to the same standard. Catastrophizing is easy, but it doesn’t fix anything, so let’s take a minute and really investigate the possibilities. How can we use this tool to make our lives, jobs, and writing better? And hasn’t academia successfully adapted to these kinds of changes before?
Using a calculator doesn’t mean you don’t understand math.
In fact, I would say that you can’t efficiently use a calculator unless you understand math. If you don’t have a grasp of the concepts at work, you won’t know when to use which function. Chat GPT is a tool that follows similar logic. We don’t need to pretend calculators aren’t real, and we don’t need to pretend we live in a world without AI. What we do need to do is teach people when and how to use the tools available to them to yield meaningful results. Let’s help students see that AI writing tools can be a great jumping-off point—like how Wikipedia can help them identify where to begin actual credible research—but that there are best practices and academic standards that come with it. Yes, you can tell Chat GPT to write an essay, and it sort of will, in that it will give you a bunch of words in a technically correct order. But then what? How do you inject perspective, personality, analysis, outside research, and proper citations? Editing is a criminally undervalued and undertaught skill—we should change that!
Lab reports are boring.
As evidenced by the existence of the blog you are now reading, I like to write. But one mandatory science course I took in college almost convinced me that I hated it. Lab reports, as it turns out, are the worst. I had already learned the thing by doing the experiment, but I’m not crazy about passive voice or writing in the third person, so I got dinged. A lot. Thankfully for both me and Science, I never took another lab class. BUT, if the next Albert Einstein bails on their physics major because they are not great at writing, everybody loses. If AI programs help scientists (or people of any profession, really) who struggle to verbalize their findings, structure reports, or nail finicky formatting, doesn’t everybody win? Chat GPT can help us include more people in a discourse. Suddenly people who may be hesitant about writing, who struggle with learning disabilities, or whose native language isn’t English can communicate a bit more confidently. Don’t we all benefit when people find ways to articulate their ideas clearly?
Writing, as an art form, is an inherently creative and human activity.
Chat GPT and other AI produce content by searching and analyzing existing writing, according to parameters that their programmers specify. Anything written by a chat bot is, by its very nature, a derivative amalgamation of other people’s work. It’s kind of a glorified Google results page. The ability to create something truly original is what sets great artists, authors, and thinkers apart. Great writers take their own weird and unique slice of the human experience and put it into words that only they can choose. That’s what makes literature magical, suprising, and relatable. AI writing programs are a tool for thinkers, not a replacement of them. In fact, the existence of AI writing makes the voices of poets and authors more important than ever. Chat GPT is going to get better and its output is going to become more refined, but I’m confident that you’re never going to tell it, “write me a free verse poem about the relentlessness of change in the human experience,” and have it spit out Wallace Stevens’s “The Man on the Dump.” Calculators and computers have freed up time for mathematicians to theorize even cooler math. I think we’ll see this in the humanities too.
We can fear Chat GPT, lament its creation, and long for the good ol’ days, but “We want things to be how they always were,” is not a good look for anyone, least of all for higher education. There were tons of people who thought online education would never work–that remote/hybrid classes were, at best, a fad or, at worst, a degradation of higher education. How’s that argument looking these days? I’m sorry to be the one to tell you, but AI isn’t going anywhere. Adapting to this technology will require learning something new. It will require rethinking how we teach writing. It will require revisiting plagiarism policies. But it’s worth it. Chat GPT is an opportunity for your department/institution to be early adopters. Don’t be the last school still using carrier pigeons.
