Once upon a time, I wrote a lot of recommendation letters for my students’ college applications. There were often forms to fill out, and all of them had some version of a question about academic integrity or intellectual honesty. In other words, did the kid ever cheat in your class? That honesty and integrity was perhaps more important than all the grades, test scores, college essays, and yes, recommendation letters.
I was at the height of my public high school teaching career when searching the internet became a thing – a gift/curse for savvy students. I remember the first time I “exact word” googled a sentence to check the authenticity of one of my star student’s work. Sure enough, this person had copy/pasted from some website without citing their source. It was so prevalent a practice that I started studying the myriad manifestations of plagiarism. In fact, a colleague and I created a presentation on internet plagiarism that we gave at a couple of teacher conferences.
I eventually understood that different cultures have different ideas of academic integrity. Groupthink, or helping each other, is more acceptable outside the US. And then there’s Isaac Newton’s phrase, “If I have seen farther than others it is because I’ve stood on the shoulders of giants.” In fact, a library research paper is often just stringing together a series of other people’s quotes. The important part is how one does the stringing, rather, how information or knowledge passes through the sieve of one’s own mind – and always citing one’s sources.
One result of my attention to plagiarism was creating assignments that were somewhat resistant to copy/pasting. “A Tale of Two Cities” was a generic Social Studies assignment to compare and contrast two relatively randomly selected cities from around the world. It was designed to generate originality. But that was then, and artificial intelligence is now, and originality – along with academic integrity – may be a thing of the past?
For now, I’m holding on to my AI virginity. I have yet to use ChatGPT for anything. It’s a threshold I hesitate to cross, valuing what’s left of my unaugmented imagination. Of course, I’m forced to use AI in other ways, as it endeavors to finish my sentences – and I often let it (but not here). Perhaps I’ll appreciate the help as I embark upon my dotage? Or, without such out of the Pandora’s box thinking, my unaided ruminations may be puerile/futile? Teaching-wise, at least I am retired…
I shudder to think how AI will impact education, how teachers will be able to ensure academic integrity, intellectual honesty, or ever be able to evaluate originality, creativity, vision. Sure, oral defenses and the exclusive use of pencil & paper tests might encourage actual human learning? But that might happen only if student/teacher ratios are lessened – or if robots replace the teachers and their algorithms can accurately detect unaided human knowledge?
Once upon another time, teachers worried about literacy! If writing replaced memorization, books (especially printed ones) would replace the human mind. And recently, rote memorization has been much vilified. As if one could think without content? (Can there be RAM without ROM or vice versa?) Unfortunately, or otherwise, ChatGPT (AI in general) changes everything again. Yet, this massive paradigm shift may be short, as biochips, neuralinks, or other brain/computer interfaces make human education as we know it, unnecessary and irrelevant.
Worse, those of us concerned with academic integrity or the encroachment of artificial intelligence into the realm of human understanding have already lost to something far more insidious than machine learning – the kids versus the bots. Ignorance has won over academia. Stupidity has triumphed over education – at least in the American electorate. Whether it be intellect or honesty, the masses (albeit a slim majority) prefer neither to their inquiet desperation.
Ah Bartleby, ah inhumanity…