November 30, 2022, was when the generative A.I. (Artificial Intelligence) software, ChatGPT, was first released to the public. ChatGPT was created by OpenAI, a research company founded by Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman, Sam Altman, and Elon Musk in 2015, which was also responsible for the image generation tool, DALL-E.
The program has been in use by many people over the past few years for a variety of reasons. Scribbr, a company providing resources to aid students in their academic writing, has an entire section devoted to A.I. writing, along with a list of ways for students to utilize ChatGPT. While some educators have embraced the tool, many have their doubts.
“The use of generative AI has impacted my instruction in a number of ways. One way in particular is a reduction of student creativity is reduced. Students have difficulty taking the initiative to develop their own ideas. Students would prefer to have AI come up with ideas instead of original thought.” Dr. Mary Ciszek said, when asked how generative A.I. has impacted the way she teaches in her classroom. Many students at Weir High say that they use A.I. to help them come up with ideas for assignments or explain topics.
In a survey, 50% of Weir High students have confessed to using A.I. to assist their academic writing. This can range from simple edits to an entire rewrite. Some have used it to do an entire assignment. Many people worry about student’s overusing A.I. This concern has made teachers have to look at everything they grade with watchful eyes to determine if it was even made by a human.
When looking for common signs of A.I. generated writing, it should be noted that many lists have significant overlap with lists of how to write properly. In an article on common signs, Mehul Gupta lists several: a lack of typos, lack of tangents, and proper organization. Purple Frog Systems, a UK-based software company partnered with Microsoft, released their own list: the infamous em-dash, neutrality, and a mixture of spellings from British and American English. An article by Grammarly takes a different approach, focusing on common words and phrases A.I. uses, such as, “delve into”, “pivotal”, “to put it simply”, “shed light on”, “innovative”, and many more.
Obviously, none of these guarantee a text is written by A.I. Writing with proper editing should remove typos and tangents, Canadian English often uses spellings from both British and American English, “innovative” is just as good a word as any other, and the em-dash is just another form of punctuation.
Kristy Westaway writes, “The way I’ve been trained to craft sentences mirrors how AI produces content. Our writing has become too similar, and now I’m learning to ‘dumb down’ my structure to avoid those comparisons.” Westaway is not alone; many people have taken a similar approach out of concern.
At Weir High school, multiple students have reported concern about A.I. allegations. “It makes me worry my writing will be flagged for AI, when it is not,” one student writes.
A common ground among the differing opinions on the usage of A.I. is that nobody should over-rely on it. It is prone to errors and limits yourself. The school does not allow A.I. to do your assignments either. Being caught cheating with it can result in punishment.
To avoid punishment for using A.I. in the classroom, avoid using A.I. Utilize the history feature in Microsoft Word if accusations do come up. Don’t censor your writing to avoid allegations, take the time to improve it. Look up articles for writing techniques you don’t understand or consult a book, such as Merriam-Webster’s Guide to Punctuation and Style or Stephen King’s On Writing.
Generative A.I. is trained off of humans, nothing it creates is new. It’s all a recombination of what we have already done. Don’t cheat yourself on the experience of researching, creating, and learning.
