I’ve been working with so many students who turn to it as a first resort for everything. The second a problem stumps them, it’s AI. The first source for research is AI.
It’s not even about the tech, there’s just something about not wanting to learn that deeply upsets me. It’s not really something I can understand. There is no reason to avoid getting better at writing.
My thoughts on AI are: I don’t blame guns for gun violence, I don’t blame hammers when a contractor screws up, and I don’t blame AI tools when the student is too dumb to utilize it properly. I’ve been using ChatGPT to great effect, but I’m well aware of what is is equipped to handle and what it is not.
Else I’d be the type of person to grab a hammer and then rage at the void about how bad hammers are at cooking Thanksgiving dinner.
Counterpoint: the main product of a student writing a piece is not the piece they wrote, but the act of writing it. If you evaluate the outcome of the situation solely by the piece of paper and the words that are written on it, then the world is a much better place for students using LLMs. But if you evaluate the outcome by the student’s understanding of the subject, then I think we’re better off with the students having to mentally explore the nooks and cranies, footguns and subtleties of the subject. We’re better off with them pursuing a wrong line of thought, realizing it, and having to go back and try again.
Having a student write a piece – and by this I really mean write a piece, not delegate it or parts of it to a third party – is incredibly beneficial. Annoyingly, our means for checking that a student wrote a piece has always been to look at the words they wrote on a piece of paper, but the words and the paper were never really the point.
this is 100% how i feel as well… learning is about teaching you how do something, not the outcome itself. exploring structured thinking, critical thinking, creative thinking, etc (all the hats) is immensely beneficial to developing the mind imho.
Counterpoint, it means that writing papers is no longer a good exercise for ensuring students are learning material and teachers need to adapt. AI isn’t going away and it’s a disservice to students to not teach them how to use it, how to find good primary sources, etc
Ok, so draw the rest of the owl then. What alternative is there right now, ready for use, that will engage the students with the material as well as writing does?
Learning how to construct logical arguments, do research that makes sense, and communicate effectively to the right audience, all of which AI writing sucks at.
Let me ask you something. It is completely possible for a machine to do simple welds, right? Would you say that there is no reason for a welder to practice simple welds since a machine can do it?
To me, the same is true of writing. Nobody cares about the essay that was written, but it is practicing for writing that people do care about You can’t learn skills like this without doing them.
You completely missed my point. Everything you said that was bad is them using the tool improperly for the goal you stated. That’s on the student and teacher, not the tool.
If the goal is learn to write, then the tool should be used to analyze the work you wrote and provide objective criticism so you can refine it. Instructing the AI to just write the final draft of the assignment for you is what I would call using a hammer to cook Thanksgiving dinner.
Is there a new problem for teachers to figure out how to test for mastery of a subject? Yep. That sucks for them. Teachers always have impossible tasks forced on them by society. I still don’t blame the tool for any of that.
I think what you actually hate is irresponsible use of tools to nefarious or counterproductive ends.