How to machine-proof student writing

Two bloggers for whom I have great respect have both expressed concerns about new AI products that write well. (See: Scott McLeod Playing Around with ChatGPT from OpenAI and Tim Stahmer ChatGPT to English Teachers: Don’t Panic)

A primary concern is that new AI programs can now write “papers” that are indistinguishable from those written by humans - including one’s students. While I have always been a proponent of tools that can help a writer do a better job - spelling and grammar checkers, for example - I see these new AI programs more like a type of plagiarism. Someone (or something) writes, and then you pass it off as your own without attribution.

As a former English teacher and a front-row observer of the accessibility of online sources of writing that are easy to copy and paste, I’ve thought quite a lot about how one prevents students from simply copying another’s work. And it isn’t taking away the internet or using plagiarism-detection programs.

Back in the dark ages of the early 2000s, I summarized some of my thoughts in an article published in Kappan - Plagiarism-proofing assignments. My major argument was: 

… our time as educators is better spent creating assignments, especially those that involve research, that minimize the likelihood of plagiarism in the first place. Rather than making assignments that can be easily plagiarized and then contriving methods for detecting or reducing copying, why not do a little work upfront to design projects that require original, thoughtful research?

I described 16 possible elements of assignments that discouraged plagiarism and provided a rubric to evaluate one’s own assignments. (Are rubrics still a thing?) I expanded this article and more in my book Teaching Outside the Lines, Corwin, 2015.

The short answer to “defeating” these new AI writing tools is to demand that the assignment be personally relevant and be, in some way, creative. My old pal HAL may know a hell of a lot, but it doesn’t know me nor, do I think, does it know how to think outside the circuit boards. Even with my limited knowledge, there are important things I can write about that AI can’t.

Now is the critical time for educators to ask themselves what humans, even ones with poor writing skills, can do that even the most sophisticated machine can’t do. Create bad puns? Describe how a topic may impact one’s family? Combine two fields of knowledge to come up with a creative idea? Show emotion?

I hope no readers of this blog ever suspect the entries are machine produced. C3PO would never write such ridiculous prose.

Graphic source