Note: This article was written in May of 2023.
“People will do anything not to do work,” said a Kalamazoo College senior. “College culture is so stressful, sometimes people need to resort to something they wouldn’t normally do.”
She is referring to the use of ChatGPT – the AI software launched at the end of November 2022. Its ability to generate text based on prompts entered by its users was intriguing to students and professors alike. In the months since its release, academics have scrambled to figure out what generative AI means for the future of learning.
Gwen Tarbox, an English professor at Western Michigan University, is leading efforts to educate faculty on the intricacies of generative AI. She believes that, if professors understand how to incorporate AI into the classroom instead of ignoring it, “not only are [students] far less likely to use AI to do their work for them, but they’ll learn how to use AI properly.”
And knowing how to use AI properly, Tarbox argues, will be a necessary skill for current and future generations of students. “Our students will spend the majority of their lives in an AI-rich environment. As professors, regardless of our age or how much we want to be involved with AI, we’re going to have to become familiar enough to make sure our students get the instruction they need.”
Tarbox allows her students to outline papers using ChatGPT. But she’s also been moving away from assigning the traditional college essay.
“Unless they go on to become an English professor – and that’s a shrinking group – most people are going to be asked to write short, concise, well-thought-out pieces of writing when they leave us. So that’s what I’m focusing on.”
“I haven’t assigned a traditional research paper in probably seven years,” she added. “But I’m always the outlier.”
Tarbox isn’t the only professor encouraging students to use ChatGPT. “My professor made us use it for class,” said an anthropology major at K. “In qualitative methods, we had to interview people and code data based on themes, so we organized it using ChatGPT. I’ve also used it to edit my writing and figure out redundancies.”
Like Tarbox, Educational Technology Specialist Josh Moon is working with K faculty to make sure they understand how to use ChatGPT in the classroom. In the spring of 2023, he led a workshop to explore what assignment design might look like when ChatGPT is incorporated.
“We had a greater number of people who were really interested in looking at the tool than we anticipated,” Moon said. “People had a lot of questions.”
Overall, Moon wants faculty “not to get too hung up on this idea of detection and plagiarism, because that’s going to be limited.” While he believes using ChatGPT to write a paper is plagiarism, he doesn’t see the issue in black and white.
“It’s not just, ‘Oh, bad you,’” he said about addressing students who use AI. “It’s, ‘What is the point of that?’ Why did I assign it that way? Why did you complete the assignment like that?”
Unlike Moon, Tarbox doesn’t believe using AI to write an essay is plagiarism – not in the most literal sense of the word. “The work isn’t someone else’s – it’s the machine’s.”
K students had mixed feelings on what to call it. “It’s pretty close, even if it’s not quite there. It’s submitting something that’s not yours, but it’s also not stealing,” said one English major.
“It might not be a person, but that AI took a lot of learning and things from articles and other things people have written and used it to compile,” said a computer science major. “It’s not turning in your own work. If we don’t learn anything in college, there’s going to be an entire generation of people who know nothing.”
“We had an ethics debate in my French class,” a first-year student said. “We came to the consensus that it is unethical – it promotes unoriginality and honestly, [ChatGPT is] kind of stupid.” Her peers weren’t the only students that believed ChatGPT had a long way to go.
“It’s not that smart – at least, not yet,” said a sophomore.
“If I’m stuck on code I’ll put in the prompt and look at what it tells me,” a computer science major said. “Most of the time it’s not right, but it does give you more ideas.”
Students and faculty agreed ChatGPT can be useful in certain situations. “I think it can be used in certain ways as plagiarism and in some ways just as an aid, and that’s perfectly valid. It can be a good support for things like outlining,” said a psychology major. Another student said, “If I need to write a band critique, I’ll ask it for a structure to follow.”
Tarbox and Moon are more focused on incorporating ChatGPT into assignments than banning it. So is Brian Gogan, an English professor and Director of First-Year Writing at WMU who is teaching a class this fall about prompt design – how users of generative AI can get it to write what they want.
“Writing is always connected to technology, and with anything new there’s an exploration phase,” Gogan said. “Sometimes people fear it, sometimes they want to dig in and try it. This class will provide people an opportunity to see how this new tool might work. What does it afford you as a writer? What limits or constraints does it have?”
“We have to recognize the way information is generated, reviewed, shared, enjoyed, is changing. If our methods don’t change, we will become obsolete,” Tarbox said. Her thoughts echoed concerns of K students. When asked how assignments might change because of AI, one student worried that “professors have been assigning the same thing for 20 years, and they don’t want to change it.”
“If professors are smart, they’ll change,” said another.
“I tend to be the kind of person who just embraces change,” said Tarbox. “I accept it. I believe we waste a lot of time worrying too much about change, because every generation has faced these kinds of radical shifts in technology.”
The need to adapt is as old as academia itself. Gogan compared AI to the printing press and the internet. “The types of questions that AI is bringing to the forefront aren’t new. This is just another technology. If you look at it more as an opportunity than something to be feared…I think it opens up new and different questions. I would hope that all teachers are constantly trying to stay up to date with currents in technology.”
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