The Massachusetts Medievalist on Athletics and ChatGPT
Like all educators, the Massachusetts Medievalist has been following the ongoing developments and conversations about AI and the capabilities of ChatGPT and similar bots that can produce banal but satisfactory college-level written work. I've seen analogies that try to liken AI to a calculator, since it can write paragraphs for you in somewhat the same way that a calculator can do long division for you – but I am starting to think that athletics training might be a more fruitful comparison.
(Lesley women’s soccer team celebrates yet another conference championship)
Athletes who participate in fall sports are now getting ready to get back on the field or the court or the track. They are trying to build up endurance and strength; they are refining skills and monitoring nutrition and thinking about strategy. Most of their coaches have sent them details about expectations for fitness levels to begin the season – how much running at what pace, how much weight training, how many sit-ups and squats and lunges.
And here’s the thing: athletes know that if they lie about their preseason preparations, their coaches and their teammates will know. No one wants to be the soccer player who says she's been running 15 miles a week but can't get through wind sprints on the first day of practice.
Using ChatGPT to complete a writing assignment, especially if a professor has explicitly stated that a student should not use it, is like lying about training. The lie isn't as immediately apparent as the one about summer training – no one's throwing up on the sidelines of a first-year writing class. A student who gets satisfactory grades on writing assignments and passes writing classes but who cannot actually write clearly and smoothly will eventually be revealed, maybe in an upper-level seminar, maybe in an internship placement, maybe in a professional setting where the lack of basic communication skill will lead to poor performance reviews and possibly dismissal. Like the cross-country runner who needs to put in the time and effort during the summer in order to excel in fall competition, a student needs to put in the time and effort to learn to write in order to excel in the rest of the academic and professional world.
In my new role as Lesley's Faculty Athletics Representative, I want to try out this analogy with our student-athletes, many of whom, I'm sure, have used ChatGPT and its ilk to crank out discussion board posts and short essays that are mechanically correct and blandly mediocre. Like all our students, they need to engage in the hard work of deciding what they think, what they want to say, and how they want to say it. They need to craft and then re-craft their written work so that it is not just mechanically correct but thoughtfully individuated and intellectually interesting. That’s a challenge just as formidable but probably more elusive than a series of 30-second planks. I am confident they are up to the task.