ChatGPT and AI writers

If we resign ourselves to thinking that resistance is futile and allow AI to replace students’ voices, we are surely guilty of abandoning our responsibilities as educators

A great deal of ink has been spilt recently following the launch of ChatGPT and the advent of AI that can generate text and answers of a sufficient standard to be used by students in their assignments. Responses, in my opinion, have thus far been rather predictably, if not troublingly, conformist.

Writers here in THE and elsewhere have variously suggested that if we can’t beat it, we ought to join it and that hybrid or asynchronous communication ought to be embraced and integrated as part of the brave new world of human-machine creativity. More informal discussions with colleagues have suggested that resistance seems futile and that we ought to embrace AI to equip students to operate in a hybrid world of the artificial and the real for the purposes of employability. Some slightly more ambitious voices have suggested that AI-generated assignments make the case for authentic assessment or a more “human” form of assessment even more urgent, but how this might transpire in ways other than falling back on the adage of assessment for learning, constructive feedback and alignment with skills seems less clear.

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