Artificial Intelligence and the Death of Student Writing

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE-AI, 17 Jun 2024

Lisa Lieberman | After the Truth Shower - TRANSCEND Media Service

Illustration: geralt/pixabay

The Move Away from True Hands-on Scholarship Feels Tragic

7 Jun 2024 – It was getting toward the end of this recent semester, and I was at a loss. Either one of two things was happening: My freshman-composition students’ writing had gotten mysteriously, miraculously, markedly better over the semester compared with previous ones, or a large minority — easily one-third — of them were using AI to write their papers.

I’ve been teaching community-college courses in California’s Central Valley for the past 12 years, and I’ve prided myself on my clever assignments, designed to prevent plagiarism — assignments such as comparing totalitarian regimes in The Handmaid’s Tale and 1984, or discussing the feminist undertones of Charlotte Perkins’s The Yellow Wallpaper and Kate Chopin’s The Story of an Hour. But it no longer matters how good my assignments are. By simply inputting the assignment’s parameters, with the click of a button, a student can, in two seconds, come up with something brilliant and polished.

Take, for example, this excerpt from a student’s essay I assigned about The Shining, by Stephen King: “The Shining is a terrifying examination of the human psyche via the lens of Jack Torrance. A complex depiction of Jack’s development from a struggling family guy to a vessel of lunacy and malevolence is made possible by Stanley Kubrick’s brilliant direction.”

I called the student in and asked him to write a sentence with the word “depiction.” He admitted he didn’t know what “depiction” meant, much less how to spell it, much less how to use it in a sentence. He confessed he hadn’t written a single word of the essay.

Another student complained when I gave her a zero for using AI. She said, “I don’t know why you’re picking on me. I turned in all my assignments on time. And I never used AI.”

It was true she hadn’t used AI, but when I pressed her, she admitted to using Grammarly.

Bingo. I investigated Grammarly and discovered it’s a multilayered computer program that does everything from simple spelling and grammatical corrections to rewriting entire sentences, adjusting tone and fluency. “The school gives Grammarly to us for free,” she said.

What?! I checked with my department head, and she said that yes, the college gives students basic Grammarly free, but that if students have full sentences rewritten with AI, then they’re using the higher-level model that costs money, and that isn’t endorsed by the college. Grammarly is free, but for a small monthly fee of $12, Grammarly can write most, or all, of an essay. I wrote my department head back, saying, “What the school is doing is the same as handing out cigarettes on campus and telling the students not to get addicted.”

I looked online to see how other colleges were handling issues with Grammarly and other AI-software programs, and there were no definitive answers. Even worse, some colleges expressly prohibited teachers from using AI checkers, for fear of false positives.

Still, what do you do with sentences like this one — Emily’s tragic fate is ultimately sealed by the rigid social norms and expectations that govern her life, forcing her to conform to the expectations of her family and community at the expense of her own happiness and well-being — from a first-year writing student whose earliest in-class writings were barely literate?

When I used to read good writing like that, my heart would leap with joy. The students are getting it! I’d think. Now my heart sinks because I know those sentences/paragraphs/whole essays are probably computer-generated. When I run them through the AI checker, I’m almost always right. When I began noticing a few students using AI and Grammarly, I realized a full one-third of them were doing it. It was a sickening feeling, like the time I found a few mouse droppings in my kitchen cabinets, and discovered the whole house was infested.

But it wasn’t just that one-third of my students were using AI for one or two assignments. Once they believed they could turn in AI assignments undetected, they got bolder (like the mice) and used AI for every single assignment. One of my online students, whom I’d given a zero for using AI, asked to discuss the essay. He insisted he had written most of the essay himself. When we spoke on the phone, I read aloud a few well-written sentences and he admitted he hadn’t written those parts of the essay.

“You see, that’s the shit I’m trying to avoid,” I blurted out.

I quickly apologized. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to use that word. It’s just so frustrating to spend all this time grading and find out you didn’t write chunks of it.”

The student apologized, and I let him rewrite the essay. I gave him a gentleman’s C.

When I catch a student using AI, I email him or her and say, “If you want to discuss this, please email me.” Eighty percent of the time, they never write back. I assume they’re embarrassed because they know they’ve been caught red-handed.

There is something truly horrifying about AI. And it’s not just my as-expected moral indignation. It’s that the level of cheating is just so damn good. Take this student’s sentence for example: In a small town in Iowa, where cornfields stretch to the horizon, and life moves at a pace that would make a sloth look like a speed demon, Angie Bachmann, a typical stay-at-home mom, found herself in a rut, bored.

It was the line “life moves at a pace that would make a sloth look like a speed demon,” sounding as if it came out of a Truman Capote novel, that got me. It’s demoralizing that an 18-year-old student, with literally no effort, can come up with something that I, as an English teacher and professional writer, would struggle to do.

So, the question is, if AI is that good — and presumably getting exponentially better at warp speed — what is the point of learning how to think critically or how to write when the computer can do that for you? I can’t help but wonder if years from now English composition will be phased out of the school system altogether.

It’s not such a far-fetched idea. That was the whole crux of the recent Hollywood actors’ and writers’ strike. At issue was whether Hollywood producers could use AI to write entire screenplays and TV shows, thereby obliterating the need for real writers. The writers scored a narrow victory when producers agreed to allow AI only in very limited ways.

No one knows for sure where AI will lead us. In higher education, we can’t make AI go away, so some teachers are embracing it. One of my colleagues, whom I like and respect, is showing students how to use AI in the classroom to generate ideas, but not to use on final drafts, she explained.

Some teachers are taking this a step further. I read recently that some teachers are using AI to grade papers. How is that going to work? Students will write their papers with AI and teachers will grade them with AI? So it will be one computer grading another computer’s work.

I could be wrong about this. It could be that AI will help the collegiate world in ways I’m not considering. But still, this stepping away from true hands-on scholarship and turning toward AI feels tragic. I remember my days at Berkeley, where, as an English major, I’d take my copy of Wallace Stevens’s The Palm at the End of the Mind, or Chaucer’s “The Wife of Bath’s Tale,” and pick a nice, sunny spot on campus on a grassy knoll underneath a tree, lay out my blanket, and spend the afternoon reading and scribbling notes in my books. It was just me and my books and my thoughts. There was nothing better.

As I lay there reading the writer’s words, they came to life — as if the author were whispering in my ear. And when I scribbled my notes, and wrote my essays, I was talking back to the author. It was a special and deep relationship — between reader and writer. It felt like magic.

This is the kind of magic so many college students will never feel. They’ll never feel the sun on their faces as they lie in the grass, reading words from writers hundreds of years ago. They won’t know the excitement and joy of truly interacting with texts one-on-one and coming up with new ideas all by themselves, without the aid of a computer. They will have no idea what they’re missing.

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Lisa Lieberman is an adjunct instructor in the California Central Valley and a freelance writer and editor.

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