Artificial Intelligence Presents Existential Threat to English Professors
Recently, I attended an English meeting where one of my colleagues showed us three websites that use algorithms that can paraphrase passages that are not detected by plagiarism-detection software such as turnitin. This same colleague said he had seen a spike in students who were cobbling together essays by pasting these paraphrased passages together and presenting them as original essays.
Even though they passed detection at turnitin, these essays had telltale signs of being plagiarized; the word choice and writing style were “fishy,” and under questioning, the students confessed for their crime of intellectual thievery.
Some students claimed they didn’t know they were committing plagiarism because the websites advertise themselves as being “anti-plagiarism” so that the students believed they were using a writing aid that helped them not commit plagiaristic offenses.
At the meeting, we all agreed that our anti-plagiarism software is becoming worthless as A.I. is getting better and better.
In fact, A.I. is getting so effective, it’s not long before students can take any essay prompt and A.I. will write an “original” essay for them.
Let us for a moment imagine that such A.I exists. A student can have any essay prompt, no matter how complexly written, and compose an essay that will be received as an original student essay even when it is not.
Now let us also imagine that A.I. exists so that professors don’t need to grade essays. A.I. can do a far better job, and do so in a way that is more beneficial to the student.
If A.I. reaches this level of sophistication in the realm of writing and grading, then suddenly English instructors like myself have to face the existential question: Why do I exist?
I ask this because it seems that technology is threatening the very existence of English instructors in three major ways.
First, technology is creating an environment in which Artificial Intelligence-generated writing will be preferred over human writing because speed and efficiency will prove more valuable than a human laboring over a text. This type of labor will be time-consuming and reduce productivity compared to the speed of A.I.
Second, technology is shortening our attention span so that the kind of longer texts that writing professors teach are becoming less and less relevant.
And third, technology creates a metric such as Rate My Professor that modifies professors’ behavior in ways that deviates from traditional teaching methods.
Let us first look at Artificial Intelligence-generated writing. We have reached a point in technology where people don’t need to learn the craft of writing because A.I. can do it for them.
Let’s take the example of students graduating college and going off to work in business or advertising. Their boss gives them a memo; these employees can use A.I. to both interpret the text they are given and have A.I. produce a written response to that memo.
Most likely, A.I. would reduce longer memos and texts to bullet points, simplified versions. These simplified responses will be encouraged because A.I. will expedite both the speed and accuracy of getting these tasks completed.
As human beings, we adapt to our environment. If A.I. is more efficient and accurate for interpreting and writing business memos and other types of writing, then the craft of writing won’t be needed as it has been traditionally believed.
This tendency to reduce everything to bullet points is contrary to the writing instructor’s desire to teach students how to interpret long texts. For example, is difficult to conceive teaching the 500-page Autobiography of Malcolm X or Charles Dickens’ 700-page masterpiece Bleak House or the 700-page unabridged Norton edition of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick in a world where everything is being reduced to bullet points.
Some may argue that a college graduate should be more than someone who is just a worker bot manipulating A.I. As a college English instructor, I’m supposed to help college students reach a baseline of linguistic acquisition, communication, and argumentative skills. These are supposed to be essential assets for a valuable employee. But if an employee can show his value by managing A.I. and achieving success based on metrics, speed, and accuracy, then most likely we will radically alter our definition of what it means to be literate for the job.
Literacy will no longer be showing the skills to interpret a long text and to write a cogent report of that text, but to implement A.I. when necessary to get comprehend and write texts as efficiently as possible.
Expedience and technological currency, not literacy, will be the premium at work.
The second existential threat to college writing instructors is the tendency In the last decade or so, to shorten our attention span by presenting everything in an abbreviated form. Often, longer material is reduced to bullet points.
Take The Daily Beast online news magazine. It takes long news pieces and condenses them into a list of top trending news stories. You can click on the original news site if you want to, but most people are content with The Daily Beast’s abbreviated or condensed paraphrase of the longer article.
Take Twitter. We can scroll through a series of headlines and soundbites without reading the actual article. In fact, over time our brain prefers to skim than to read because the human brain’s default setting is always set on the path to least resistance.
Some will argue that the value of a professor and an employee is beyond some metric that you will find on a popular website for students, Rate My Professor. Those metrics, some would argue, pale in comparison to the intangibles: charisma, humor, story-telling, historical context, irony, and so on, and these things enrich others.
Of course, this is true.
But in an age of algorithms, we place less value on intangibles and more value on metrics.
My self-worth is now tied to how many followers I have on this or that social media.
My social and professional status are likewise connected to some kind of metric.
For example, I am a college teacher. My boss told us at a meeting that the number one mechanism students use to sign up for a class is Rate My Professor.
The easier you are with your grading and the less homework you give, the higher your ratings will be. Classes fill up based on positive Rate My Professor rankings. Classes fail to make the mandatory minimum of 20 students based on those ratings as well. We can be certain that over time that Rate My Professor is an effective form of behavior modification. Professors won’t wake up and suddenly be easy graders. But compromises in their grading and teaching standards will happen gradually.
We are now at a crossroads at college writing. Soon Artificial Intelligence will be able to write any essay, interpret any long, legal text, and grade any paper.
Soon Artificial Intelligence will be able to navigate a thorny legal problem better than any attorney.
We don’t have Rate My Attorney yet. But we do have attorney Yelp reviews.
These online metric systems influence our behavior and define what it means to be successful.
College writing instructors are going to have to stay current with the technology; otherwise, we will be be fossilized skeletons of some lost era when the craft of reading and writing existed without the aid of Artificial Intelligence.
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