Overall, AI is evil. At least in my little world. This semester I caught numerous students who used ChatGPT to create their essays. I found it really easy to spot these examples of plagiarism. Very little detail. General statements. Not many specifics. No analysis. Just dull, linear narratives.
I may be gruff, but I am lovable, so I gave my students the opportunity to fall on their swords. If they did, if they confessed their sins to me, I gave them an opportunity to do the assignment the correct way. Interestingly everyone I identified as using AI to do their work acknowledged doing so. Which included a profession of disappointment in themselves and a promise to never turn to the dark side again (at least in my class).
We had to take three professional development classes this semester. I took one on AI and how to use it successfully. We were shown how AI in various fields or disciplines but in the Liberal Arts and Humanities, AI can be easily abused.
So many of my colleagues reported students plagiarizing their work this semester by using ChatGPT. Some came down hard by reporting them for their deviance, while others gave students the opportunity to redo the work. What we had in common was the need to stop our students from using AI. We were introduced to AI programs that can tell us if the work was written by ChatGPT, or some other AI. Those are remarkably accurate, such as GPTZero. This article covers various detection software.
Well, ChatGPT might not be here to stay but harder-to-detect AI is on the horizon and those will indeed write more thoughtful, meaningful, and insightful papers. At that point, we are in deep kimchi.
However, I think what we cannot do with AI is ignore it, sweep it under the rug, police it into a SuperMax, or exile it to Guantanamo Bay. There are ways to bring AI into the classroom without degrading the academic integrity of the course or its rigor.
Students are using AI to cheat. So why not bring the Trojan Horse within our classroom walls, this time knowing what to expect? AI is not necessarily the enemy unless we treat it as one and when we do, we look upon students' use of AI as something "criminal."
Let us identify the positive or beneficial aspects of AI and put those to the test. Inevitably, we will have to live by the words of Rodney King who in 1992 asked "Can't we all get along?"
