ChatGPT: I'm sure this scorpion will treat me well after we cross the river
The story of the scorpion and the frog is a story of somewhat unclear origin wherein a scorpion asks a frog for help to cross a river, the frog reluctantly agrees, and then dies from the scorpion sting after crossing the river. Sometimes I feel like my embrace of ChatGPT may resemble this fable as I court my own destruction as a teacher and academic. For now we are still in the river crossing phase, so let's enjoy the swim.
Recently my class did a unit on extremist rhetoric online complete with a guest presentation by Sara Aniano (which was awesome). For their quickwrite they had to address hateful speech online and discuss the most effective ways of countering the speech. However this semester came with a twist, I required that they use ChatGPT (or another AI program) to produce a first draft, submit it, and then improve on the initial draft. The results were fascinating.
The Chat programs produced similar, but not identical initial responses for most of the students.
The students took the initial drafts in radically different directions. Some of them barely edited at all, some of them turned the listicle form of the chat answer into more traditional prose, some of them took the ideas from the response most relevant to the readings and discarded the rest.
Everyone met the baseline of expressed understanding I usually seek in response. However, it is much more difficult to tell if the responses reflect actual understanding since the original material was generated for them.
My friend and collaborator Nik Janos and I were discussing the exercise and he aptly pointed out that what we call writing is actually a bunch of different phases and tasks lumped together. This episode in my class moved them from the generative tasks of writing into the editing and checking phase of writing. That is not a value judgment by itself--just an observation that the activity was qualitatively different than what I usually require.
The spirit of radical transparency in my class seems to have been well received by my students and they continue to alert me if they have used the program so I am learning a lot along the way about how ChatGPT is useful, what problems it helps students with, and where it breaks down. That is to say, the swim across the river with the scorpion has been quite pleasant so far. As to what awaits me on the bank of the river? Tough so say, but I'm sure the scorpion will appreciate the work I have put in.