Guest Post on The Massachusetts Medievalist: André Ruesch on ChatGPT
A belated happy new year from the Massachusetts Medievalist! 2023 promises numerous knotty problems for all of us to think about, not the least of which is the ChatGPT bot, the AI tool that can almost instantly produce mechanically correct, seemingly sensible prose in response to a prompt.
University faculty worldwide are thinking about the implications of this tool for their teaching, and my colleagues at Lesley are no exception. We are sharing links, thinking out loud in formal meetings and informal conversations, and wondering whether and how to work this technology into our classes – or at least how to acknowledge its existence to our students.
My colleague André Ruesch has designed a lesson plan to incorporate ChatGPT into his English composition class and supplemented it with reflection on the implications of trying to work with AI writing tools in the undergraduate classroom. André brings his expertise in visual critique, film studies, pedagogy, and photography to what follows. When he shared an earlier draft with me, I asked him to let me post it here as a guest blog, since it presents so thoughtfully the issues all readers and writers will be wrestling with in the months and years to come. From André:
After I sent the Atlantic article The End of High-School English to my fellow faculty in the Lesley Humanities Department in early December, a rich conversation sparked around the impending issues in relation to the spring semester and ChatGPT.
As we understandably don’t have a policy around student use of ChatGPT, and since this issue is so of the moment, I decided to address this white elephant in my 2023 spring term English Composition class. "The History and Trajectory of Humanity and Artificial Intelligence" is the course theme, with one assignment dedicated to the chatbot. A caveat in the assignment states: "We will research Chat-GPT and use it at certain junctures. Please do not cheat yourself or the research by using the AI before you are instructed to do so. We will be dealing with the very latest developments around the ideas of writing support, ethics, creativity, and plagiarism." (Any student not comfortable signing up with the bot will be given an alternative assignment.)
In any case, I believe that our current dilemma will be short-lived. Detection software like GPT Zero, in continuing development by a Princeton student, Edward Tian, is expected to recognize the patterns in AI-generated texts. Universities are likely to adopt and integrate AI checkers, similar to the way they have integrated plagiarism detection, according to What does GPT Zero mean for universities and other sources.
No matter how best practices and stipulations around AI evolve at educational institutions, there is no doubt that AI is here and will become part of our lives as surely as computers did in the nineties and smartphones in the following decade. The current decade may well be characterized by AI developments and their emerging applications; for example, most new cars already use the technology for safety purposes.
Many colleagues seem to be focused mainly on the potential pitfalls presented by AI. Concerns include:
§ Students won’t learn. Students will cheat. Most importantly, individual voices, creative and critical thinking will go straight out the window.
§ Students will develop dependencies on their chatbots. Without them they will be lost.
§ We would be contributing to dumbing down our students instead of elevating them to their full potential.
§ Integrating chatbots is akin to legitimizing plagiarism
However, if students learn how to benefit from the technology without cheating themselves, and thus become able to have more rigorous and detailed discussions about their essay and thinking, the answer may be to figure out how to make that happen. I hope my English Composition assignment is a step in that direction.
Some benefits that AI could provide, at Lesley and beyond:
§ Society used to be divided between the literate and the illiterate. General literacy has contributed to almost everything that defines our contemporary world, personal opportunities, and freedoms. AIs have similar potential to level the playing field further and to become immensely useful and personalized, based on the user’s identity, needs, preferences, and discussion history.
§ At Lesley, we constantly ask ourselves how we can make our classes and learning more accessible to diverse students and prepare them for the world they will be living in. A chatbot could be immensely empowering for them in a multitude of ways.
§ For the sake of our students, we need to consider embracing AI instead of fearing and resisting it -- it is here whether we like it or not.
§ From the faculty perspective, imagine reading a student paper and being able to take much more time responding to the ideas and concepts, as opposed to the mechanics. The student's revision process could focus on ideas and more sophisticated research while correcting bot and internet errors, misinformation, and so on.
I had to learn to write in beautiful handcrafted cursive writing with a fountain pen. Ballpoint pens were forbidden! Then came the typewriter, which erased the individuality of handwriting and caused concerns about distinguishable proof of authorship; then came computers, the spell and grammar checker, verbally dictated text, the internet, Grammarly etc. All these have been helpful to so many students who otherwise would have been less likely to succeed. Somehow none of the fears about any of these developments ultimately manifested in the way people thought they would-- or the upside outstripped the negatives immeasurably. If chatbots become the main interface between people and various tasks at work and in life, they become the new fountain pens, which replaced the ink bottle and feather quill.
Lesley University, known for its pioneering work in education and expressive therapies, has a unique opportunity here. We need to ask ourselves: What does this tech make possible for our students in the Threshold Program? Our international students? Our underserved inner-city students? Our students with dyslexia? All our students with accommodations and other learning differences? How do we use AI to develop learning pedagogies that will apply to the reality of negotiating life and work in the twenty-first century? This is an opportunity for Lesley and other pedagogy-driven colleges to move towards the leading edge.