This article makes me wonder about the future of student essays… Could they, in a few years, be written at home with the aid of Artificial Intelligence? Or purely by AI? And what would that mean for our teaching? 😳 https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/21/books/review/the-age-of-ai-henry-kissinger-eric-schmidt-daniel-huttenlocher.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
@simondoubleday From my experience as a student, most undergraduate essays might as well be written by AI; since a sizable number (perhaps majority) of students just look up a bunch of essays on google then just reword them slightly for their assignments without even trying to formulate a somewhat original thought or interpretation. AI won't really change this, just make it easier. The only real way to gauge someone's understanding of a topic is either a conversation or an in-exam essay. If AI ever starts writting original masters or phd theses, we should be terrified.
@simondoubleday Yes it is true that framing essays in a certain way can force out more original ideas but that seems to be difficult in practice, especially in more introductory courses. I do not think that conversations are necessarily difficult to grade so long as you are sticking to standard letter style grading in terms of one's understanding of a set of ideas, but of course the presentation of those ideas will not be as smooth as they would be if they were written out and edited ahead of time.
@Clementulus I think there are ways of framing essay assignments -- in a very specific and original way -- that, at the moment, should make it nearly impossible to use Google as a resource. But yes, I also thought of the advantages of a conversation as an alternative gauge of understanding. Difficult to grade, perhaps?