[Ads-l] Disagreement about AI and education: The college essay is dead (not dead)

[ADSGarson O'Toole]

Website: The Atlantic
Article: The College Essay Is Dead
Article subtitle: Nobody is prepared for how AI will transform academia.
Author: Stephen Marche
Date: December 6, 2022

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/12/chatgpt-ai-writing-college-student-essays/672371/

[Begin excerpt]
The essay, in particular the undergraduate essay, has been the center
of humanistic pedagogy for generations. It is the way we teach
children how to research, think, and write. That entire tradition is
about to be disrupted from the ground up.

Kevin Bryan, an associate professor at the University of Toronto,
tweeted in astonishment about OpenAI’s new chatbot last week: “You can
no longer give take-home exams/homework … Even on specific questions
that involve combining knowledge across domains, the OpenAI chat is
frankly better than the average MBA at this point. It is frankly
amazing.” Neither the engineers building the linguistic tech nor the
educators who will encounter the resulting language are prepared for
the fallout.
[End excerpt]

Website: Slate
Article: A.I. Could Be Great for College Essays
Author: Daniel Lametti
Timestamp: Dec 7, 2022 at 5:50 AM
https://slate.com/technology/2022/12/chatgpt-college-essay-plagiarism.html

[Begin excerpt]
Every year, the artificial intelligence company OpenAI improves its
text-writing bot, GPT. And every year, the internet responds with
shrieks of woe about the impending end of human-penned prose. This
cycle repeated last week when OpenAI launched ChatGPT—a version of GPT
that can seemingly spit out any text, from a Mozart-styled piano piece
to the history of London in the style of Dr. Seuss. The response on
Twitter was unanimous: The college essay is doomed. Why slave over a
paper when ChatGPT can write an original for you?

Chatting with ChatGPT is fun. (Go play with it!) But the college essay
isn’t doomed, and A.I. like ChatGPT won’t replace flesh and blood
writers. They may make writing easier, though.
[End excerpt]

Garson

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