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Yes, I saw South Park last night. But I had already written 98% of this post! Let's just pretend I'm timely for once.

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I so agree. Let students use ChatGPT. Give them assignments that allow them to think critically (like how would they solve air pollution, which government policies best benefit parents, how should social media companies be held liable for harm), have them come to class to debate about it, and allow them to use all the tools at their disposal to research it. Let them have their computers open and their phones in their hand. Recall and memorization are useless now (as are writing essays!). What we really need is for people to be able to research and to think! (And the research part is so much easier with ChatGPT!)

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So I really strongly disagree with this. The important thing about writing short essays isn’t just learning how to formulate sentence structure, it’s learning how to put together ideas, slow down and think about things critically. It’s being forced to express your own ideas rather than adopting someone else’s words without ever really having to think in detail about them.

One of my favorite quotes is from Timothy Snyder: “Avoid pronouncing the phrases everyone else does. Think up your own way of speaking, even if only to convey that thing you think everyone is saying.” And this goes for writing too. The very basis of chat bots is taking what everyone has already said and using it to create a predictive imitation of what’s already out there. Writing originally helps us to think originally which helps us to speak originally. Students want to skip over this, not just to get As, but because the process itself is difficult and takes effort, concentration and attention that they don’t have. But how often have your thoughts and ideas become clarified by sitting down and having to formulate them into words, and having to structure your ideas in a way that makes it possible for readers to understand?

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I think you could argue that these more basic tasks perhaps appear trivial/unnecessary once AI can do them for us, but are in fact foundational skills. Can you become a great essayist without first learning to write these kind of short essays? A calculator can perform maths tasks, but presumably to become a great mathematician you need to know how to do that stuff by hand. An artist needs to learn how to sketch, and so on.

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Woah, I disagree. Isn’t the skill we’re talking about the same one that enables us to write coherent comments here? Translating thoughts to words that make sense to other people is essential. Having chatgpt write an essay is fine, in theory, but in the real world if your ideas are important, *you* have to be able to write about them.

Yeah, students who don’t cheat don’t want to be cheaters. But also, maybe they think their ideas really matter.

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I depend on a series of short essays for my weekly classes. They have to have citations. I haven't looked into Chat enough to know if it does footnotes. Does it?

I admit to cheating when a word program finishes a word I am inputting. Especially "liaison" --is that cheating?

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I agree with this essay completely, even though as a former English teacher I should be exactly the kind of person who is freaking out about ChatGPT.

You are right to point to fields that technology made obsolete--memorization and penmanship for example--because, with the exception of those people who, apparently under the impression that we’re still in pioneer times, lament that schools don’t teach cursive anymore, the rest of us are perfectly fine with and even grateful for technological change. Heck, I have a quite good memory, but I find it much easier to just take a photo or screenshot too. And it’s not like anyone--teachers or students--enjoyed writing and grading those stupid essays. I know I didn’t. So let’s view ChatGPT not as a crisis, but as the opportunity it is.

Incidentally, in Switzerland the penalties for speeding are very high, and there are speed cameras everywhere, so no one speeds. Except in one place I know of: there is a 3-km-long bridge near me, with speed cameras at each end but none in the middle. So everyone goes about 10kph above the speed limit for the middle 2km of the bridge. “Wheee!” I imagine them all saying. “Take THAT, speed cameras!”

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