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>> In the past, Donahoe would set her students to writing assignments in which they had to make an argument for something—and grade them on the text they turned

>> In the past, Donahoe would set her students to writing assignments in which they had to make an argument for something—and grade them on the text they turned in. This semester, she asked her students to use ChatGPT to generate an argument and then had them annotate it according to how effective they thought the argument was for a specific audience. Then they turned in a rewrite based on their criticism. That won't work. The student can just ask ChatGPT to annotate the argument it generated itself previously (or in the same session). Basically, as long as you're asking your students to turn in a written assignment, they can use ChatGPT to write the assignment. It doesn't really matter what you ask them to write, and how much of it you ask them to generate by ChatGPT or by the student's hand, the student can choose to have the whole thing generated by ChatGPT and there's nothing you can do about it.

welshwelsh 4y ago
So what's the problem? If ChatGPT can do all that stuff then there's no reason to teach students how to do it. Same reason we don't teach assembly in programming classes anymore, since compilers can do that for us. Instead, students can now move on to more complex things. For example, maybe the teacher can have their 2nd graders use ChatGPT to reproduce a research paper on quantum computing and submit their results to a peer-reviewed scientific journal.
- YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago
  Not just a research paper, anything! The 2nd graders -hell, the 1st graders!- can use ChatGPT to submit articles to wikipedia. They can use it to submit articles to news outlets. They can use it to generate recipes to submit to recipe aggregators. The possibilities are truly endless! In fact, the people working in those publications and tasked to review all the submissions, don't have to do that anymore. They can just feed the submissions to ChatGPT, and let ChatGPT generate a review for them. See, there is no read to write anything anymore, and there's no need to read anything anymore, either. We can just let ChatGPT do all that stuff for us! Of course, a few years down the line, there won't be any reason to submit, or publish, articles or anything else anymore, either, since there won't be anyone left who can actually read, besides ChatGPT, and that would be pointless if it will be ChatGPT that's produced all the writing already. But, I'm sure that all this will sort itself out in the long run.

welshwelsh 4y ago

So what's the problem? If ChatGPT can do all that stuff then there's no reason to teach students how to do it. Same reason we don't teach assembly in programming classes anymore, since compilers can do that for us. Instead, students can now move on to more complex things. For example, maybe the teacher can have their 2nd graders use ChatGPT to reproduce a research paper on quantum computing and submit their results to a peer-reviewed scientific journal.

YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago
Not just a research paper, anything! The 2nd graders -hell, the 1st graders!- can use ChatGPT to submit articles to wikipedia. They can use it to submit articles to news outlets. They can use it to generate recipes to submit to recipe aggregators. The possibilities are truly endless! In fact, the people working in those publications and tasked to review all the submissions, don't have to do that anymore. They can just feed the submissions to ChatGPT, and let ChatGPT generate a review for them. See, there is no read to write anything anymore, and there's no need to read anything anymore, either. We can just let ChatGPT do all that stuff for us! Of course, a few years down the line, there won't be any reason to submit, or publish, articles or anything else anymore, either, since there won't be anyone left who can actually read, besides ChatGPT, and that would be pointless if it will be ChatGPT that's produced all the writing already. But, I'm sure that all this will sort itself out in the long run.