“And I, for one, welcome our ChatGPT overlords…”

When teachers catastrophize, I generally tend to not buy in. When my colleagues complain about the latest bureaucratic stuff we’re expected to do, I figured you just ride it out. When somebody starts going on about how the students are getting dumber every year, or worse every year, or more feral every year (post-Covid fallout notwithstanding), I typically kind of roll my eyes and think about how they said the same thing probably since around the second generation of students in human history.

And then along came ChatGPT.

Upon realizing why I was starting to periodically get well written, articulate (if bland) papers from students who had typically turned nothing in and yet I could not detect any plagiarism my reaction was simple: Well… education had a good run, but we’re done.

Gradually I calmed down a little bit. First, focusing on how to detect it without spending all my time on it (more on that another time) and now that it’s summer and I can step back a little bit looking at are there ways to use it that are beneficial in the classroom?

 Short answer: …Yyyyes? 

I’m still early on in exploring it and researching, but I am willing to accept that there are some positive applications if used very judiciously and very carefully. It’s worthless for research, for example, but beneficial at brainstorming search terms for a topic. It’s highly useful and constructing a template for an idea you’re trying to flesh out, except for the terrible slippery slope into letting it do the thinking for you.

In my more wildly optimistic moments, I imagine being able to focus on what makes writing so worthwhile. The beauty of it, the eloquence, the creativity. I don’t know how to get there, but I am hopeful. Kind of.

For example, just out of curiosity, I asked ChatGPT to write me a blog post about being concerned about the existence of ChatGPT, but then getting cautiously optimistic about its classroom uses. What it came up with sounds like a thoroughly uninspired – if suspiciously enthusiastic – endorsement of the uses of ChatGPT in the classroom. But purely functional. Not interesting, not clever. (This isn’t it. This is 100% human functional, non-clever writing)

I’m sure I’ll be circling back to this topic as I explore more, so maybe the end isn’t nigh just yet. Not just yet.