Depending on your perspective, the newest amazing or catastrophic development in technology has arrived: OpenAI’s Chat GPT. If you haven’t heard about it, it’s a chatbot that crafts complex, nuanced, even human-sounding responses to user-generated prompts. Its conversational mode is familiar to those of us who have visited websites with virtual customer service “assistants.”
Many people are, appropriately, awed at this advancement in artificial intelligence and eagerly experimenting with ways the program can change the way we work, produce content, and learn. Many others, however, are wary: do we really want to live in a world where content creation can be (and has been) handed off to computers?
Naturally, for English teachers, the existence of ChatGPT raises a whole host of other concerns. How do we assign student writing in a world where students can, for free, ask a computer to write their essays for them? Plagiarism has been bad enough in a world where students can Google anything they want, buy essays online, and share documents with one simple click of a button. It’s easy to feel like the hardest part of being an English teacher (teaching writing, assigning writing, evaluating writing) is now totally out of our control. We are Sisyphus. The rock has finally defeated us. And to some extent, this isn’t hyperbole.
We’re not going to find a foolproof method to stay ahead of every technological advance that comes our way. Rather than panicking (or even worse, admitting defeat), we need to be quick on our feet, thinking of ways to teach in a world with rapidly advancing technology. There are already tools being developedto detect AI-generated writing, and many educators have written about meaningful ways to use ChatGPT within the classroom. What we want to address here, however, is an approach teachers can take to make it more difficult for students to use ChatGPT to produce quality essays for your class assignments: including specific requirements and structures within your prompts.
What Can You Do ChatGPT?
Just to see what ChatGPT was capable of, we gave it a few prompts.
First, we asked, “Connect the Odyssey to the stages of Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey.” ChatGPT gave us a list of events in the epic poem that reasonably corresponded to those stages.
Then, we asked, “Write an essay connecting Odysseus’s journey in The Odyssey to Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey.” ChatGPT produced an accurate, readable response that was, essentially, the list we had gotten before but organized into essay form with slight elaboration.
Finally, we asked (trying for a less commonly-taught text), “Write an essay connecting a theme in The Virgin Suicides to the protagonist character’s development.” On the one hand, it was impressive: the six-paragraph essay was organized in the traditional format, included a thesis statement, identified “themes” (more on that in a minute) relevant to the novel, and provided accurate information from the text. On the other hand, it was an essay we would probably have scored a D in AP English Literature: the “themes” were topics, not theme statements; there were no quotations from the text (and certainly no commentary directly tying those quotations to the thesis); the brief essay tried to address too many things; and most significantly, the essay was very superficial, largely sticking to unsupported generalizations. It looked good, but, on closer examination, said little.
ChatGPT also reminds us that if we want our students to produce original ideas, we have to include on-demand writing assignments as part of our curriculum.
Outwitting ChatGPT
Clearly, we’re not going to find a foolproof way to keep our students from using ChatGPT or detect it when they do: ChatGPT is a better writer than many students who have come through our doors. What we can do, however, is require students to include enough specific elements in their writing assignments that ChatGPT will be unlikely to provide a perfect response.
In our writing assignment for The Odyssey, we pre-determined the events that aligned with the stages of the hero’s journey (based on the excerpts we provided to students) and asked students to write an essay explaining how those twelve events fit. While ChatGPT’s response was reasonable, it did not include all twelve (a savvy student might recognize this and address it themselves, but in our experience, lots of students who resort to these sorts of crutches are feeling desperate and don’t always pay careful attention to details like this).
Because students were expected to use our twelve events, provide correctly punctuated and integrated quotations from the translation we used in class, make connections between the events and key Greek ideals (from specific YouTube videos we assigned), and use provided sentence frames for some sentences, it would have been unlikely for an AI-generated response to earn full credit. Could a student have gotten some points by turning in the ChatGPT response? Maybe. But that student would not have received anywhere close to an A.
ChatGPT also reminds us that if we want our students to produce original ideas, we have to include on-demand writing assignments as part of our curriculum. Of course, students should have opportunities to write process essays and use the many technological tools available to them (even, possibly, ChatGPT), but we need to ask them, at least once in a while, to put their devices away and use pen and paper to produce original content.
We can talk to our students about the importance of original ideas and show them the flaws of AI-generated writing, but at least some of the time, we need to remember that our students are imperfect humans living in a stressful world: they’re not always going to make the right choice when temptation is literally a click away, and we need to provide temptation-free opportunities for them to demonstrate learning.
Quite a few sources have highlighted the inadequacies of Chat GPT: it’s not infallible, and there is still room in this world for original, human-generated writing. So take heart! Whether it’s in the classroom or the business world, people can only get so far relying on artificial intelligence. We may not be able to prevent AI-generated content from entering our classrooms, newsfeeds, or emails, but we can certainly find ways to recognize and reward original work.
What have your experiences been with ChatGPT? We’d love to hear more about it: this is new for all of us, and we want to support you no matter how the resources, tools, and obstacles in your classroom change. Reach out to us at [email protected] or on Instagram @threeheads.works to share!
