“What I did was I put it through ChatGPT, it gave me a summary of the article, and I just used that.”
“[Name redacted], you’re a genius!”
This was a real exchange heard in the RWU dining hall. The word “genius” here was used less traditionally, complimenting a shortcut to bypass thinking.
If you are using ChatGPT for all of your assignments, one thing to keep in mind is that copy and paste does not take four years of practice. You are ready to go out into the world and plagiarize now! Using artificial intelligence to complete writing or assignments is the easy way out that guarantees five minutes wasted “completing” that assignment. There is no hope to gain anything from the process, besides again, improved copy and paste abilities, whereas if you really completed the assignment, there’s at least a small chance that you could learn. Are you resigned to never learning or being challenged with writing assignments? If so, then hopefully you are enjoying this massively expensive, all inclusive vacation in Rhode Island, complete with a degree at the end. But are you capable of more here?
The honest answer for some students could be, “Kind of, but not really, so who cares; copy and paste.” If college students are truly incapable of learning through assignments or doing acceptable work, then is it advisable that ChatGPT be used as a tool for those students, as an equalizer? The use of ChatGPT upsets many professors and nerds alike, because these people think that robots are evil. Also because ChatGPT is lazy. However, what nerds, such as myself, like to ignore is that being born into a well-educated family or with a high IQ, takes even less effort than using ChatGPT.
Many students who come into the writing center for tutoring claim to have written very little in high school, sometimes due to the limited effort required by online schooling during the pandemic, where many students were thrilled to gain back their right to nap time. Schools have varying levels of rigor to begin with, leaving some students with lower likelihoods of developing skills that students from top private schools can count on. Free online AI services have given students with poor reading comprehension and writing skills a life raft, because they have been thrown into waters that do not suit their interests and abilities. Submitting admissions test scores is now optional, but societal pressure to attend college and make money afterward are ever-present. The criteria to attend a four-year college today (and I don’t mean Harvard) is a high school diploma, submission of a complete application, and a limited criminal record. Besides that, you are an adequate customer for college! Even admissions essays can be written by a combination of ChatGPT and our mothers.
In an age where 69% of high school graduates attend college, it is likely that not all of us are really capable of getting A’s, B’s or C’s. It is true that ChatGPT can produce slightly less crappy work than some students can. As long as grades are assigned in classes, students will be looking to inflate them. Unlike the exonerated nerd faction, students who cheat are able to set their egos aside, humbly leaving space for the words of others: plagiarism. I assume that when these students click the “I am not a robot” check, they think to themselves: “No. I’m much, much worse.”
The inability of some students to meet college standards, relying on cheating, defeats one purpose of being here. The goal of colleges, outwardly, is creating more enlightened professionals. If you have automated your own academic career, how can you claim to want to become an enlightened professional, or even a person in that field of work you are “studying”? Most students here do not plan on becoming enlightened professionals, rather than simply accredited professionals… with a beer habit. When students feel that this will not happen or be fun enough, they drop out. By banning the use of technology that serves these college customers with a singular goal of graduating, colleges would be sabotaging their second goal: staying open.
At a rate of one per week, American colleges are closing for good. The cost of college has more than doubled, adjusted for inflation from what it was in 1963. Seen by the prevalence of ChatGPT, many college customers find their work to be pointless and above their capacity. The business model of college has become incredibly inclusive, and rather than cutting the vacation short and opting out of the degree, some college students have found a work around that is not going anywhere, and will improve (and has completely out-paced the nerds selling papers industry). Exactly how ChatGPT can be balanced with human thought should be considered, but crutches exist for our legs. Grock exists for our brains.
