Professors, embrace ChatGPT and the academic reckoning to come

Lately, when I’m bored in class, I like to close my eyes and ask whether ChatGPT could’ve written what I’m hearing. It’s often a toss up.

Case in point: This week’s discussion question in my journalism class was, “Do you think today’s cell phones have made journalism better or worse, and why?”

What followed was a half hour of opining on the ingenuity of the smartphone and its historic, monumental, crazy, marvelous, staggering, extraordinary, awesome implications — just in case you forgot about your phone’s capabilities (or how to use an online thesaurus). 

Generic questions beget generic answers, and university professors ought to remember that in any context. ChatGPT, which could’ve written any one of those bland answers, is just another reminder of that fact.

The artificial intelligence chatbot that took the world by storm in November already has some declaring the end of high school English, college essays and human intellect as we know it. It’s a convincingly human writer — so much so that it might actually seem more human if it were worse at what it does — which is to say it’s perfectly understandable for a college professor to be wary of ChatGPT. 

But to discourage or even ban students from using the program would be missing the point. When the Mesopotamians invented the wheel, the correct question wasn’t “How can we ban these to preserve the old way of dragging our shit from place to place?” but instead “How can we use these to make our lives better?” I’ll admit there are crucial differences between the wheel and ChatGPT, but the point still stands.

ChatGPT, still in its developmental phase, already presents a compelling case that AI will forever change professions where written or spoken content is the ultimate product, including speechwriting, journalism, comedy and cinema. 

The program is effectively king of generic writing, and so long as the product is on par with a human’s work, I’m not sure I’d complain if marketing copy, budget reports, meeting minutes or even “just-the-facts” news reporting were written by a computer. But ChatGPT has also understandably drawn some skepticism.

“It’s grammatically right,” said Taly Matejka, a writing lecturer at the Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. “It’s got good rhythm and cadence and sentence variety, but it doesn’t actually tell me anything specific that I don’t know already.”

ChatGPT wouldn’t get an A in her class, Matejka said, though she wants to use it as a tool to help her students learn. What many writers often forget when discussing ChatGPT is that we’re not talking about a sentient being whose writing and critical thinking compares to our own. It’s just a reflection of ourselves: It was trained on our own writing.

Whether ChatGPT could land an A in a prestigious university’s writing program is hardly the point. Most humans couldn’t land an A. The question is whether ChatGPT’s writing beats out the average human in some respects, and, if so, how we can use it as a tool to augment our own capabilities.

As of now, like Matejka said, ChatGPT isn’t able to piece together arguments and opinions deep enough to be particularly interesting. But it does beat most of us in its understanding of grammar and syntax, which is certainly going to require a reevaluation of writing rubrics.

“Was good grammar the thing we should’ve been stressing in the first place?” asked Mark Marino, a Dornsife writing professor. “To what degree has [grammar] been used to gatekeep from people who don’t have access to that mastery?”

Imagine if ChatGPT could help international students who speak English as a second language — or even domestic students who still struggle with grammar and syntax — write in standard, academic English. It’d level the playing field.

Where things get dicier is a scenario where students in writing courses like Matejka’s use programs like ChatGPT to help articulate their own lived experiences and worldviews. That forces us to ask: What do we really value? Is writing simply a proxy we use to evaluate the substance in our heads? Or is it an end in and of itself?

“What I’m teaching isn’t how to learn how to write like ChatGPT,” Matejka said. “What I’m teaching is, in part, learning who you are … what you actually mean and how to say it.”

Historically, it’s been nearly impossible to separate the quality of the writing from the substance of its underlying ideas. But perhaps ChatGPT will change that.

More broadly, ChatGPT and the host of copycat programs that are sure to follow are going to force a long-overdue reevaluation of our priorities in the world of academia. What are we really testing for? What do we really ought to be teaching our students? What’s the point of a school in the first place?

I’m not sure what the answers are yet — and there will no doubt be growing pains — but the only real way to get there is to welcome the changes now. So spin the wheel. Embrace the robot army.