One of the most remarkable and frightening things about AI software is that it can produce a decent college-level paper for free. If you are still a holdout, I encourage you to give it a try - at ChatGPT, type “write a 5 page paper on Christianity in Emily Dickinson’s poetry,” or whatever topic you like. It will spit out a serviceable paper in a few seconds.
Once cheating students would have bought such a paper online, one that presumably had been written by a human being who knew something about the topic in question. Now ChatGPT will compose it for you at your convenience, even just minutes before it is due! (ahem)
As with most technological advances, teachers are just going to have to get used to the new reality posed by AI. There’s a whole literature now on best practices for using AI in courses, and how to limit the amount of cheating students do via AI.
When used well, AI-generated writing is technically correct and likely better informed than a typical undergraduate student’s paper. (As an informed non-expert on Dickinson, the experimental paper on her poetry above introduced me to some fascinating passages that would be excellent evidence in an undergraduate essay.)
But short of a “singularity” when (theoretically) AI develops independent reasoning capacity or self-consciousness, the best AI writing is going to be uninspired, because it is utterly derivative. This means that it is similar to much advanced undergraduate or early-stage graduate writing, in that it doesn’t demonstrate imagination or creativity. It just says what others have said.
Joseph Epstein recently wrote a fascinating review about AI prose at the Wall Street Journal. He pointedly observes that “a composition rendered by AI is certain to be grammatically and otherwise formally correct, lacking only in originality and an interesting point of view.”
Since we are created in God’s image, humans have a spark of creativity that AI simply can’t match. But “creativity” and “imagination” are difficult to define, and it can be hard to explain to students what exactly good writing entails beyond technicalities.
You know good prose when you see it, though, which is why it is so essential (as Epstein reiterates) for aspiring writers to constantly read excellent books and essays. As Epstein notes paradoxically, “writing cannot be taught but it can be learned.”
It reminds me of a student who asked a professor at a U.K. university how she could improve her papers from ‘B’ to ‘A’ work. The professor, somewhat flummoxed, said that she should “just be more brilliant!” The student did not find this advice to be especially practical…
AI can and will do many things. It will inexorably get better at gathering reliable information and summarizing that information in a concise, technically correct manner. But at a basic level, it can’t move beyond gathering and collating. It can’t imagine things that no one has before. It can’t be “more brilliant.” For that, you need a creative mind.
“Thomas S. Kidd on Christian History: From the Reformation to the Present” - my interview with Nadya Williams.