A couple of weeks ago, I gave a talk/lead a discussion called “So, What About AI Now?” That’s a link to my slides. The talk/discussion was for a faculty development program at Washtenaw Community College, a program organized by my friend, colleague, and former student, Hava Levitt-Phillips.
I covered some of the territory I’ve been writing about here for a while now and I thought both the talk and discussion went well. I think most of the people at this thing (it was over Zoom, so it was a little hard to read the room) had seen enough stories like this one on 60 Minutes the other night: Artificial Intelligence is going to at least be as transformative of a technology as “the internet,” and there is not a zero percent chance that it could end civilization as we know it. All of which is to say we probably need to put the dangers of a few college kids using AI (badly) to cheat on poorly designed assignments into perspective.
I also talked about how we really need to question some of the more dubious claims in the MSM about the powers of AI, such as the article in the Chronicle of Higher Education this past summer, “GPT-4 Can Already Pass Freshman Year at Harvard.” I blogged about that nonsense a couple months ago here, but the gist of what I wrote there is that all of these claims of AI being able to pass all these tests and freshman year at Harvard (etc.) are wrong. Besides the fact that the way a lot of these tests are run make the claims bogus (and that is definitely the case with this CHE piece), students in our classes still need to show up– and I mean that for both f2f and online courses.
And as we talked about at this session, if a teacher gives students some kind of assignment (an essay, an exam, whatever) that can be successfully completed without ever attending class, then that’s a bad assignment.
So the sense that I got from this group– folks teaching right now the kinds of classes where (according to a lot of the nonsense that’s been in MSM for months) the cheating with ChatGPT et al was going to just make it impossible to assign writing anymore, not in college and not in high school— is it hasn’t been that big of a deal. Sure, a few folks talked about students who tried to cheat with AI who were easily caught, but for the most part it hadn’t been much of a problem. The faculty in this group seemed more interested in trying to figure out a way to make use of AI in their teaching than they were in cheating.
I’m not trying to suggest there’s no reason to worry about what AI means for the future of… well, everything, including education. Any of us who are “knowledge workers”– that is, teachers, professors, lawyers, scientists, doctors, accountants, etc. etc.– needs to pay attention to AI because there’s no question this shit is going to change the way we do our jobs. But my sense from this group (and just the general vibe I get on campus and in social media) is that the freak-out about AI is over, which is good.
One last thing though: just the other day (long after this talk), I saw what I believe to be my first case of a student trying to cheat with ChatGPT– sort of. I don’t want to go into too many details since this is a student in one of my classes right now. But basically, this student (who is struggling quite a bit) turned in a piece of writing that was first and foremost not the assignment I gave, and it also just happened this person used ChatGPT to generate a lot of the text. So as we met to talk about what the actual assignment was and how this student needed to do it again, etc., I also started asking about what they turned in.
“Did you actually write this?” I asked. “This kind of seems like ChatGPT or something.”
“Well, I did use it for some of it, yes.”
“But you didn’t actually read this book ChatGPT is citing here, did you?”
“Well, no…”
And so forth. Once again, a good reminder that students who resort to cheating with things like AI are far from criminal masterminds.