Yet Another Think-Piece on ChatGPT

From 1999 to 2017, I taught college.  Then I ran into some trouble.  From 2017-2022, I was deprived of teaching.  Technology changes rapidly in five years, which means pedagogy does, as well.  The classroom to which I returned last fall, albeit in the Arab World rather than the United States, felt profoundly familiar.  It also changed in ways I can’t quite comprehend. 

During the five years of my academic exile, I drove school buses, wrote novels, babysat, and learned to cook.  It wasn’t an unproductive period, especially if we liberate perception from capitalist notions of productivity, but a lot happened on campus that passed my attention.  My return coincided with the launch of ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence system said to do everything from screenplays to college essays. 

From the moment I set foot on campus, ChatGPT was all anyone wanted to discuss.  Through a combination of ignorance and arrogance, I didn’t understand the fuss, or perhaps didn’t care to understand it.  I returned to teaching with a clear sense of direction.  There had been plenty of time to stew over how I might behave in the classroom if I ever made it back into one, so I suppose I was also a bit defensive:  no way was some fucking machine gonna disrupt my vision. 

Many of my friends teach and, though a combination of overwork, precariousness, and bureaucracy, they seemed down on the business.  On social media, it was one horror story after another. 

But I found the students at my new home, the American University in Cairo, to generally be delightful.  Mostly Egyptian of middle- and upper-class provenance, they were insightful and compassionate.  Despite proclamations to the contrary from old farts in ill-fitting suits (purchased through the largesse of Gulf ruling dynasties), the students exhibited fierce opposition to Zionism and to Western imperialism more broadly.  They possessed that wonderfully Third World combination of hopefulness and skepticism.  They were gracious about my foibles and happy to provide advice about getting by in a new country.  We enjoyed lively discussions of culture and literature.  We had fun.  I like to tell myself that we did a bit of learning, too. 

In the day-to-day of teaching, then, there were no problems. 

I knew that if I ever returned to the classroom, I would swim against traditional forms of workload and assessment.  I had no desire to be a taskmaster.  Students would proceed at a pace that suited them.  We would explore what kind of world we exist in and think about what kind of world we might one day like to inhabit.  I always thought of “theory” as the attempt to figure out what needs to happen between the two timelines. 

By and large, the approach worked.  AUC students weren’t accustomed to the free-flowing structure, so I often had to reassure them that grades were simply a technical manifestation of their intellectual subsistence, an unfortunate necessity to satisfy bureaucratic regulations.  Be present, do the assignments, participate in discussion at a level that suits you, and you’ll be happy with the grade.  No curves, no proportionality, none of the billy-badass antics that some instructors like to pull to show how impossibly smart they are.  Easy A, basically.  I wanted them—some of them, anyway—to discover how joyful and cathartic writing can be when the act is unburdened of formula and prescription. 

My first semester, I received a bunch of technically mediocre essays filled with creativity and insight.  I could see each unique personality in the mass of words.  Sometimes I could see joy, as well. 

Then ChatGPT arrived in Egypt. 

The second semester was much like the first until I received a batch of papers.  I didn’t catch on at first, but after three or four I noticed that they were perfunctory, soulless, technically proficient.  In a superficial way, they were decent essays:  focused, logical, coherent.  But it takes a lot more than focus, logic, and coherence to produce strong writing.  Strong writing requires curiosity, risk, analysis, vulnerability. 

I’m aware of my limitations as a writer and thinker, but I know, have always known, what a good paper looks like.  It comes in hundreds of varieties, but all have one thing in common:  a distinct authorial voice.  As my students deployed it, ChatGPT couldn’t manage the task. 

Maybe it will get there.  I don’t understand technology enough to make predictions.  Maybe my students will learn to use it more effectively.  They are tomorrow’s leaders, after all. 

*****

The implications of artificial intelligence are overwhelming.  I can only speak about the technology as a new teacher in the unusual position of also having been a teacher in the old days, when the internet was still novel. 

I sense a similar apprehension in Corey Robin’s recent article about ChatGPT.  “In all my nearly 30 years of teaching,” he says, “I’ve never once assigned an in-class test.  But [until] it looks like until a better option comes along, I’m going to have to go with in-class midterms and finals.  It makes me sad, but I’m not sure what else to do.” 

Robin’s befuddled tone likely resonates with many of his colleagues across the disciplines.  It certainly speaks to my confusions and anxieties.  I just want to teach.  I know that the sentiment can mean anything, or nothing at all, but there was a time when it at least seemed possible to pretend that the sentiment is coherent.  I don’t know what the hell to do next semester.  Pedagogy is now an irritating combination of inexperience and nostalgia. 

Robin doesn’t simply mourn the baffling new technology, though.  He identifies what’s at stake for those who view writing as a source of regeneration:  “Good work was never about writing good papers.  It was about being able to order your world, to take the confusion that one is confronted with, and turn it into something meaningful and coherent.  And to know that that doesn’t just happen spontaneously or instinctively; it’s a practice, requiring, well, work.”  This idea of “work” is critical to a certain perception of writing, one rooted in an Emersonian notion of self-improvement.  The view may be quaint or passe, but it endures precisely because art provides opportunities to engage the world beyond consumption and passivity.  Of all the things that can be said about ChatGPT, in the end it is a form of passive consumption tethered to the capitalist information economy, something that many of us don’t care to facilitate.  

As Robin points out, the work of writing is “not simply a skill for college classes.  That’s a life-long practice, of being able to see a situation, pick out those elements that matter and lend it significance, and bring clarity out of chaos.” 

This idea of writing as avocation, as a process of theorization that illuminates what is systematically obfuscated by centers of power, has survived many great leaps of technology.  It was central to the development of composition programs and literary cultures within the academy.  “But now,” Robin concludes, “it all kind of seems pointless.” 

*****

ChatGPT doesn’t stop anyone from just teaching; it requires them to teach differently, either by incorporating the technology or by creating AI-proof assignments.  (Won’t we eventually lose that battle, too?) 

The angst that so many instructors express these days goes beyond the syllabus.  ChatGPT brings into focus larger questions that have long dogged the profession—namely, a growing perception of the humanities as an unnecessary expense and therefore disposable.  We know that, given their way, scores of administrators and politicians would wipe out degree programs that don’t meet their vision of productivity, for both financial and ideological reasons.  It’s all happening amid a cantankerous ascent of reactionary forces in the public sphere.  Good writing, a byproduct of critical thinking, isn’t simply useless; it also threatens the soul of the polity. 

ChatGPT must feel like a godsend to these pols and admins.  They don’t have to abandon writing and creativity and critical thinking.  Of course not!  They would never!  As it happens, they simply don’t need actual people to teach that super-important stuff anymore. 

A lot of instructors—beyond the humanities, it should be said—now struggle with an existential worry.  Are we now useless?  Fear of automation is a feature of most workers’ lives at this stage of capitalism, but for college instructors it was difficult to imagine removing the human element of teaching even if increasingly corporatized universities had tried everything short of inventing a machine to replace us with cheaper delivery methods.  An already-battered and -precarious workforce now contends with the very real possibility of obsolescence. 

*****

My second year as a new teacher begins in a few weeks and I still don’t know what the hell to do.  I can’t assign papers the way I used to.  ChatGPT hasn’t merely undermined my approach; it has also made me paranoid.  I don’t think I can ever trust a submission again.  I still believe—foolishly, I’m sure—that I can tell the difference between a machine-generated essay and one produced by an 18-year-old, but I always imagine my way into the part where I falsely accuse a student of cheating. 

Why not just let the cheaters cheat and the learners learn?  Those who are interested in an old-fashioned liberal education will receive it.  The others…well, we’re not cops, are we?  Nothing we can do about it if they don’t want to learn.  Hasn’t it always been this way?  Nerds and slackers, the age-old classroom dichotomy.  I guess, but this kind of free-market approach seems fraught with problems.  In the end, our responsibility is to all students and one of the greatest things about teaching is when a once-apathetic youngster comes into appreciation of the course material.  Anyway, never has this sort of bargain—cheat if you must, I’ll look the other way—been made so explicit. 

Why not incorporate ChatGPT into the curriculum?  Teach students how to operate it fluently using the most effective parameters and search terms?  It could become a marketable skill.  I’ve seen this suggestion floating about, but it’s a hard no for me.  It strikes me as an abdication of our human capacity for insight and creativity, and anyway I haven’t even the basic qualifications to teach programming. 

Lack of options isn’t the problem.  Finding an option that maintains a reasonable semblance of critical pedagogy is the problem.  Maybe I can submit AI to systematic interrogation?  Or maybe I can pretend it doesn’t exist?  Like I said, I don’t know what the hell to do anymore. 

*****

I want to say something meaningful, even profound, about the social and economic consequences of machine-learning, but my reaction to students’ ChatGPT submissions wasn’t analytical.  It was emotional.  I felt hurt and betrayed, although with time I came to recognize my own insecurity as the source of dismay.  I was rebelling against the obligation to be more cynical. 

I like to think I wasn’t alone in this self-pity, in questioning whether my professional life was suddenly futile.  Ironically, the ugly experience of having been expunged from academe five years earlier helped prepare me for the current reckoning.  I had already sifted through that question and came to the conclusion that meaningful struggle, of the interior or material variety, requires no institutional apparatus, and might be better off without it.  I needed to reapply that counsel to a newly institutionalized mentality.  I had spent untold amounts of time longing for reacceptance into an industry that no longer exists, and that in many ways had already ceased to exist back when I participated in it.  I occasionally viewed academe, despite so much countervailing evidence, as a site of fundamental probity.  There it was:  an irrational but insistent desire to maintain unreliable fantasies of solace and abundance.  I can’t think of a more appropriate motif for the humanities. 

I still don’t know what to do, but I figure that nothing yet stops me from engaging students in a way that might produce the sort of learning outcomes I value.  We can still have rich conversations about Egypt and the Global South, about oppression and resistance, about the limitations of the publishing industry, about the role of art in social and cultural economies.  Or anything else to do with “literature.”  The grading needs to change, but it was always my least important concern.  I’ll find other ways to record those annoyances. 

Still, something has been lost and it does no good to pretend otherwise.  On the bright side, the same old questions, great and small, remain unanswered.  In a sense, innovation evokes a return to our most primal anxieties. 

Many teachers of my generation now struggle to make sense of a strange and intimidating world, to find stability in a marketplace that considers us expendable, to assimilate new technology into the routines we find comforting and familiar. 

But isn’t that exactly what we were doing on our electric typewriters back in the good old days?