Since late last year, artificial intelligence platforms like ChatGPT have become a growing topic of conversation on college campuses, with students using the technology for everything from class assignments to essays.
Since late last year, artificial intelligence platforms like ChatGPT have become a growing topic of conversation on college campuses, with students using the technology for everything from class assignments to essays.
These text-generating software programs sift through massive databases to generate human-like responses to prompts or questions from users. The rapid introduction of this technology and its relatively unknown potential have spawned both awe and apprehension.
So what are the possible positive and negative effects of these tools? How might they change how we think about writing, creativity, authenticity and teaching? What is the path forward?
To better understand these questions, we spoke with three scholars in NC State’s Department of English. Our faculty offer insights on the technology’s societal and ethical ramifications, how to deal with issues like plagiarism, and the importance of increasing AI literacy, among other topics.
Chris Anson, Professor of English: Written communication represents myriad purposes and genres across thousands of different contexts. Much of it is created to handle routine tasks, such as describing a home for a real estate listing, sending an apology letter to a customer or providing accurate directions to a location.
In such cases, using AI-based natural language processors (NLP) to fulfill the task does little to challenge the cognitive processes of the human writer. The reason is that the writer is ordinarily not significantly changed by the writing task, especially when it uses boilerplate-like language—language that is often repeated with a few unique details inserted. Instead, these software improve efficiency and make time for the person to do higher-level, more cognitively sophisticated kinds of writing.
However, when people compose unique texts that require complex reasoning—the framing and support of arguments, and choices of structure, language and style—their composing process alternates between mental formulation and textual output. Writers test and evaluate their visual representation of thought on a page or screen as it emerges, discovering new ideas and subsequently revising the text. Writing can change the writer, opening up new perspectives and beliefs or revealing what there still is to learn.
Especially in educational settings, the reciprocity of writing and thinking is essential for intellectual development and higher-order reasoning. Asking an AI-based system to write an essay on a topic that the (human) writer has not yet explored significantly subverts the thinking and learning process.
