AI, my students and me: 'Last semester marks the nadir of my experience in academia'

'Letters from America'

The writer and journalist Thomas Chatterton Williams has been startled by the omnipresence of artificial intelligence at university, which he believes threatens the very foundations of education and our ability to think.

For the past three years, I've taught two small text seminars every spring semester at a picturesque American liberal arts college nestled along the banks of the Hudson River, a two-hour drive north of Manhattan.

One course is a tour of black American thought and autobiographical writing spanning the slave narratives of Frederick Douglass to the present-day polemics of Ta-Nehisi Coates. The other is a pet project of mine, an in-depth survey of the key texts of the French writer who means the most to me: Albert Camus. That second class is conducted in English and open to all students, even non-philosophy majors. We begin softly enough with The Stranger and proceed through The Myth of Sisyphus and The Plague before spending the final stretch wrestling with The Rebel, an extremely challenging text for a generation of students almost entirely unfamiliar with not just the murderous 20th-century movements of fascism and communism Camus is concerned with, but also the literary, biblical and classical references he assumes his readers will bring to the endeavor.

This problem is not unique to my institution. Today, even the most prestigious universities in the United States, which once required students to read and write in Latin and Greek, have drastically lowered their standards. At Columbia University, one of the optional application prompts asks students what podcasts they listen to. Whereas in the last century W.E.B. Du Bois could write that he "walked arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas," one could now enter the Ivy League saying the same of Joe Rogan.

A lack of background knowledge of Nietzsche, Saint-Just, Dostoyevsky and, somewhat more alarmingly, even Cain and Abel and Prometheus, is not insurmountable, I explain on the first day of class and reiterate over the course of the semester. All that is required not just to pass but to thrive is honest and sustained intellectual effort: students must attend every class; read the assigned texts; participate in in-class discussions; display competence in written assignments.

Widespread disruption

It is this last component of the student-teacher compact that has been wholly undermined over the course of my time at the college, thanks to artificial intelligence. The LLMs have so thoroughly disrupted the very notions of authorship, plagiarism, and even independent thinking that I will never again be able to trust writing from students that I don't personally witness be committed to paper.

OpenAI unleashed ChatGPT on the world in November 2022, two months before I began teaching in January. That first year, as we acclimated ourselves to the kind of jokey parlor tricks the neural nets could generate – think of Shakespearean iambic pentameter filtered through the voice of The Notorious B.I.G. – one or two of my students tried, clumsily, to submit artificially generated writing almost charmingly thinking I wouldn't notice. This was easy enough to detect, and the penalty was immediate failure.

At the time, in the absence of larger, institution-wide protocols at my university and many others – as well as the lower schools graduating cohorts of adolescents who had already had their educational lives lastingly stunted by long stretches of remote learning during the pandemic – the culture was unprepared for such monumental disruption.

As the technology became ever more embedded in our collective, internet-dependent lives, in each ensuing year, the number of students who attempted to pass off fake writing – or, more sophisticatedly, to interweave AI-sentences throughout their own – skyrocketed. The semester that just concluded marks the nadir of my experience in academia, as both a student and a teacher, and has led me to reconsider some of my most basic assumptions about the value and even the desirability of written communication in many circumstances.

The omnipresence of artificial intelligence threatens the very foundations of higher education. The detrimental effect of Google Maps on our sense of direction – to the point that, after two decades, many of us now consult our smartphones even when we know (or are supposed to know) the way – finds its parallel in the negative impact of ChatGPT and other LLM-based technologies on our ability to properly absorb and handle words and ideas, thereby undermining our capacity to think. This is, of course, a particularly troubling development in a violent, pluralistic society founded on the virtues of autonomy and fierce individualism, now rapidly falling under the sway of the numbing, incipient authoritarianism embodied by Donald Trump and the movement around him.

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In the Phaedrus, Plato – ventriloquizing through Socrates – relays a story about the mythical invention of the written word and identifies three core reasons to regard it not as progress. First, he argues, "putting our trust in writing" diminishes the habit of memory and encourages complacency, making us reliant on external stores of knowledge "that belong to others." This, in turn, provides "the appearance of wisdom" not the reality. Second, because writing is fixed, it cannot be clarified and refined through dialectical questioning: "it continues to signify just that very same thing forever." And finally, again because they are unalterable, texts, like paintings, cannot adapt themselves to the needs and abilities of different audiences – "every discourse roams about everywhere," Socrates laments, "reaching indiscriminately those with understanding no less than those who have no business with it."

Reverting to the Socratic method

I remember encountering this dialogue for the first time in an ancient Greek philosophy course I took 25 years ago in college. It seemed to me ridiculous and even offensive then. The more I threw myself into reading and writing and eventually chose these twin activities as my life's vocation, laboring over sentences that expanded into articles, essays and books, the more my belief in the opposite of Socrates's position seemed incontrovertible.

Far from being, as Plato calls it, the lifeless "image" of the spoken word, it seemed obvious to me that a seriously composed and carefully edited and revised piece of writing represented the pinnacle of rhetorical and linguistic achievement. A book or essay is a near-magical invention, collapsing large amounts of time into the space of mere pages. Something that can be consumed in a matter of hours thus requires years to compose; the 10-page essays on Camus I allowed my students three weeks to write demand just thirty minutes of my reading attention. When done correctly, writing amounts to the finest, most streamlined possible expression of a given narrative or argument.

I no longer feel so confident defending writing. Yes, for serious and probably – though not necessarily – professional authors and journalists, the hard-won achievements of voice and style and perspective will obtain no matter the ongoing innovations and interventions of artificial intelligence. But for the vast majority of students who do not aspire to make their living through these exertions, it will increasingly seem no more necessary or worthwhile than performing long division instead of reaching for a calculator. And so, I've come to think a lot about Plato's millenniums-old case against writing.

When I return to the classroom next year, I will revert to the Socratic method. Final grades will revolve around individual oral exit interviews during which students will demonstrate what he called "the living breathing discourse of the man who knows." At least this way, I'll spare myself the misery and insult of having to wonder whether even the message of apology one of my students emailed me after being caught cheating was written with the help of artificial intelligence.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5764038&forum_id=2Elisa#49196861)