I am an adjunct professor of college writing and teach online classes, and the prevalence of ai work that I suspect is ai -generated has grown to such an extent over the past year that it has changed my relationship to teaching. While I have learned many excellent methods for Detecting ai documents , Looking for signs of ai at work is different than reading a student’s work and connecting with it.
Teaching inexperienced writers to write has always been difficult and sometimes frustrating. But there’s something deeply rewarding about taking the time to respond to a fellow human’s work — something worthwhile about trying to help them develop tools to better express their thoughts and feelings and grow as living, breathing, thinking human beings. ai chatbots change this equation.
Now, instead of spending time trying to help students communicate, I look for signals from the machine. When I see suspected ai being used, I think it's important to talk to students, but not only is this time-consuming, it creates a situation where I'm frequently making little inquiries into students' ethics instead of, you know, teaching.
Because of all this, for the first time in the ten years I've been teaching writing, I seriously considered stopping working with college students this semester. In the end, I decided against it.
Instead, I'm trying to change my mindset about working with ai to reclaim some of the fun and passion that I believe robots have stolen from teaching. Here's how.
<h2 id="overcoming-ai -fatigue-focusing-on-quality-rather-than-authorship-3″>How to overcome ai fatigue: focus on quality rather than authorship
One of the signs of ai writing is simply a strange lack of quality. For a recent article I wrote about ai detection. I was reminded that sometimes it doesn't matter whether the article is ai -generated or not. A poor quality text is poor quality.
As a writing teacher, my job is to point out how things can be improved. I don't like the idea of criticizing the work of robots, but there is still a human being in charge of one of these presentations.
This semester I’m embracing the idea that the human pilot of ai -generated work can still benefit from seeing the flaws in that effort. To that end, I’m letting students know that I’m grading ai -style writing more harshly, so I hope this will discourage ai use in general.
Plus, I'll be able to spend less time evaluating whether the work is actually ai -generated or not: if it's an ai -generated writing style, I'll get a lower grade. Overall, as much as it pains me to say it, if students are going to be using ai instead of writing themselves in the future, there's value in helping them learn how to get better results from ai prompts.
<h2 id="accepting-that-there-will-be-ai -papers-submitted-that-will-get-past-me-3″>Accept that there will be articles on ai that will exceed my expectations
I think I've spent too much time focusing on ai articles this past year. I'm still paying attention, of course, but I also accept the fact that I'm going to miss some ai work.
One of the schools I teach at doesn't allow the use of ai detectors due to well-documented accuracy issues, and without using one, there's not much you can do.
At the risk of sounding cliché, my new motto is, “Give me the strength to spot the ai papers I can spot and accept the ai papers I can’t.” Because of my new focus on the quality of the work rather than how it was created, it should matter less if I miss an ai -generated paper or two, since students will most likely not be rewarded for that.
Obviously, this feels like a surrender in some ways, but I’m reminding myself that despite my best efforts, there were always students I couldn’t reach. That didn’t bother me if I was confident I’d done everything I could reasonably do to help them succeed. I’m trying to overcome my bias against ai work and extend that mindset to writing about ai as well.
Reframing the purpose of writing
For a long time, I believe that English and writing teachers have been selling the wrong message when it comes to writing.
A professor I worked for as a teaching assistant used to tell students that they needed to pay attention in his writing class because they would have to write emails as part of their assignment. That reasoning never made sense to me, and it makes even less sense now. First, most of the students in that class could already write coherent emails. Second, that kind of writing of everyday minutiae can now be handled adequately (and some would say more than adequately) with ChatGPT or other ai tools for writing.
That thought was never compelling enough for students to cancel their weekend plans to wrestle with the written word. Consequently, my new message to students is: you should not learn to write so that your resume looks better or your cover letter shines. You should learn to write because writing is one of the fundamental ways that humans can express their thoughts, hopes, dreams, and more. Writing is linked to cognition and has changed the way humans think since ancient times. When we learn to write, the blank page can be a friend we exchange ideas with or a mirror to the deepest parts of our soul. Don’t hesitate to let an ai write your cover letter. Probably another ai tool is reading it anyway ai steal the fundamental human effort of writing from you.
I know that not all students will respond to this message, but I am sharing it in the hope that some will.
NEWSLETTER
