I Quit Teaching Because of ChatGPT

I don't know. When have you heard a single student or educator in a class suggest, "All submitted papers should be available to be read by everyone in the class"? Think deeply about the impacts of that. Other than a creative writing class, I can't recall a single time when I could read someone else's papers without their express permission. I'm bringing this up because you're talking about a tired trope, that making money or credentials are the conspiratorial force deciding everything you don't like in education, inspecific to writing and thus not really engaging with the article; when really, there are much simpler and more toxic aspects of writing education that educators could reverse in an afternoon.

I don't trust LLM's to create novel ideas, and I'd never copy paste any AI output. Would I rework the output or maby use certain through processes, maby. But I'm not trusting an AI blindly, its a statistical capture of its training data not a magic wand.

That said, most professors still force students to write code on paper with no autocorrect, google, or even access to the reference documentation which seems counter productive. I remember when people were calling auto completing text editors cheating, yet despite how much we accept auto complete or how many professional developers use AI tools, were still forcing college students to use pen and paper and trying to memorize syntax and all the functions of a library, all because professors can't be decent enough to even allow access to notes or the basic language or library docs.

The AI or the documentation isn't going to solve your problems. Its enabling you to not memorize an entire language that you might not even work with in your career. Do I think their is people who can and will misuse the technology, yep you bet ya. But we need to stop forcing people to suffer due to the people who disregard the rules.

You can also tell a major difference between someone who just uses AI to write the essay or paper, and someone who uses it to develop better ideas or arguments and develop multiple ways of phrasing something. LLM's are nothing new, just like how computer vision has been good for a long time.(see opencv, YOLO, and DARKNET)

If they can solve the hallucination problem, sure. Otherwise we're going to have a lot of people who "know" things about the world that are simply made up.

I think what is more readily apparent is that younger folks cannot reverse their car without looking at the camera. Older folks still turn around and look.

I read this and it struck a chord. A decade or more ago, a friend of mine teaching English in a major state university told me that he was getting lots of students who couldn't seem to read a novel. They could read the words on the page, but they couldn't focus enough to really understand it.

My experience is that writing things out always improves my understanding of the subject. It's similar to forcing yourself to write a proof in mathematics, to verify your understanding. The formalism is hugely helpful.

If the result of chatgpt is even more kids skating through life without really picking up these skills... it may have tragic consequences. Learning to think well is the single most important thing I got from education. I would argue that improvements in human thinking -- via philosophy, logic, mathematics, the scientific method, and yes, literacy -- have made a huge difference in human lives over the past few thousand years.

Not that chatgpt would be the root cause. Chatgpt would just be a symptom of a much bigger problem.