Essays written by AI language tools like OpenAI’s Playground are often hard to tell apart from text written by humans.
While Laffin acknowledges that a reevaluation of effective education is necessary, he says this can happen when looking at the types of prompts educators assign students, noting a difference between the regurgitation of facts and information discovery. However, he worries that products like OpenAI’s text generator will make essay writing a moot point.“We lose the journey of learning,” said Laffin. “We might know more things but we never learned how we got there. We’ve said forever that the process is the best part and we know that. The satisfaction is the best part. That might be the thing that’s nixed from all of this. And I don’t know the kind of person that creates more than anything. Beyond academics, I don’t know what a person is like if they’ve never had to struggle through learning. I don’t know the behavioral implications of that.” Meanwhile, innovate_rye eagerly awaits GPT-4, which is anticipated to be trained on 100 trillion machine learning parameters and may go beyond mere textual outputs. In other words, they aren’t planning to stop using AI to write essays anytime soon. “I still do my homework on things I need to learn to pass, I just use AI to handle the things I don’t want to do or find meaningless,” innovate_rye added. “If AI is able to do my homework right now, what will the future look like? These questions excite me.”
