AI and college writing

“The demise of the English paper will end a long intellectual tradition, but it’s also an opportunity to reëxamine the purpose of higher education”: in The New Yorker, Hua Hsu asks “What Happens After A.I. Destroys College Writing?”

Many anecdotes, but I don’t see much reexamination of purpose here. Hsu contrasts professors who have returned to requiring handwritten work with professors who are intent on “getting students to see the value of process.” (But have writing by hand and attention to process ever been mutually exclusive?) And Hsu wonders about the virtues of efficiency:

In my conversations, just as college students invariably thought of ChatGPT as merely another tool, people older than forty focussed on its effects, drawing a comparison to G.P.S. and the erosion of our relationship to space. The London cabdrivers rigorously trained in “the knowledge” famously developed abnormally large posterior hippocampi, the part of the brain crucial for long-term memory and spatial awareness. And yet, in the end, most people would probably rather have swifter travel than sharper memories. What is worth preserving, and what do we feel comfortable off-loading in the name of efficiency?

What if we take seriously the idea that A.I. assistance can accelerate learning — that students today are arriving at their destinations faster?

But using AI to generate an outline or essay isn’t accelerating learning — it’s accelerating the creation of a product to turn in for a grade. And if you’re using AI to do your thinking for you, your destination may not be one you anticipated or, perhaps, even recognize upon arrival. Witness the student Hsu quotes who used Claude to “write” two papers: “I couldn’t tell you the thesis for either paper hahhahaha.” And he received grades of A- and B+.

I will once again cite the words of Ted Chiang: “Using ChatGPT to complete assignments is like bringing a forklift into the weight room; you will never improve your cognitive fitness that way.”

Related reading
All OCA AI posts (Pinboard)

[Leave it to The New Yorker to punctuäte AI. And thanks to the reader who alerted me to a missing word. Generate was what I had, and I don’t know how it went missing.]