My Stupid Battle with ChatGPT

The future of writing instruction.

“…even today, the process of hardening, the crystallization of life has not yet been completed…”

—WE, Yevgeny Zamyatin (1921)

“She is the most perfect and most obedient tool which mankind ever possessed!”

—Metropolis (1927)

“As companies like Microsoft and Meta have learned the hard way, A.I. systems can be erratic and unpredictable, or even turn creepy and dangerous.”

—“How Does ChatGPT Really Work,” Kevin Roose (2023)

What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to “write” or “compose”? The progression of technology has probably always forced us to evolve our answers to these questions. With the proliferation of relatively effective AI writing programs, I think teachers, especially teachers of writing, thinking, and research, are going to have to do a lot of soul searching, starting now.

Today was my last day as a teacher, at least for the foreseeable future. I spent about an hour of today, a scrolling through the on students’ documents, thinking a lot about the line between plagia…