For English professor Dan Cryer, using generative artificial intelligence to write a college essay is like bringing a forklift to the gym.
“If all we needed was the weights moved, then that would be great,” says Cryer, who teaches at Johnson County Community College outside Kansas City, Kansas.
“But we need the muscles developed, and students going through the process of writing are developing those muscles.”
Cryer says AI has also added a new type of labor for professors like him: trying to determine whether a student’s work is their own. He says that problem is compounded by the fact that his community college, like many other higher education institutions around the U.S., provides students access to AI tools.
He says the advent of these tools has created a new burden for students too: finding the line between responsible and irresponsible AI use.
“It’s not fair to them,” Cryer says.
More than three years after ChatGPT debuted, generative AI has become a part of everyday life, and professors and students are still figuring out how or whether they should use it, especially in humanities courses.
A recent survey suggests many students are diving right in: According to a poll by Inside Higher Ed and the Generation Lab conducted last July, about 85% of undergraduates were using AI for coursework, including to brainstorm ideas, outline papers and study for exams. Roughly 19% of students also reported using AI to write full essays.
More than half of students who used AI for coursework had mixed feelings about it, reporting that it helps them sometimes but can also make them think less deeply.
Aysa Tarana, a recent college graduate, was in her first year at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities when ChatGPT was released. She says she started using the chatbot for little tasks, like suggestions for topics to research.
But Tarana says she eventually stopped using AI because it made her feel like “I was outsourcing my thinking, and that felt really weird.”
That’s exactly what Cryer worries about.
After spending a sabbatical studying generative AI, he came to his own conclusion: Cryer believes educators should use AI tools as little as possible in their teaching.
“It seems to be one of the main purposes of these tools is to keep you from having to think so hard,” he says.
Cryer says he now devotes more time to persuading his students of the value of putting in the work to become better writers. He says he explains to them that the goal of their education is the process, not the product — because society doesn’t need more college essays. “What we need is students to go through the process of writing research papers so they can become better thinkers, so they can put together a cogent argument, so they can differentiate between a good source and a bad source,” Cryer says.
And if students rely on AI to do their work for them, Cryer says, it could end up cheating them out of the education they signed up for.
A professor who sees value in generative AI
In Charlotte, N.C., Leslie Clement says she has come to view generative AI as a powerful collaborator that can enhance student learning.
“We encourage [students] to use it because we know they’re going to use it, but to use it in a responsible way,” says Clement, a professor of English, Spanish and African studies at the historically Black Johnson C. Smith University.
Clement says she allows students to use AI to create outlines for their papers, get feedback on ideas and compare different sources of information.
Clement also co-created a course called “African Diaspora and AI” that examines how AI impacts people of African descent globally, including the dangerous mining of cobalt, a crucial component in AI technologies, in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The course also covers potential future benefits of AI, as well as the contributions of Black researchers and scientists.
Source: npr.org