Chenea Bond has an excellent rationale for banning the use of AI in her classes.
8/13/24
3/27/24
Students tend to turn to ChatGPT, a generative artificial intelligence tool, when faced with increased academic workload and time constraints, according to new research published in the International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education. The study also reveals a concerning trend: reliance on ChatGPT is linked to procrastination, memory loss, and a decline in academic performance.
ChatGPT linked to declining academic performance and memory loss in new study, by Eric W. Dolan
3/15/24
Writing is two things above all: it is a craft, and it is a personal communication. (I suppose some technical writing might be excepted from this.) Writing that claims to be from me to you but is actually from me and my Bot—or even just my Bot—to you is inauthentic and sometimes even deceitful. It involves a person in the reader, but the personhood conveyed through the writing is compromised. This writing involves impersonation as much or more as it involves a real person in the human author. And insofar as writing is a craft, if I were in a Medieval-style guild for writers, I can’t imagine letting an apprentice pose as a master or even a journeyman simply because he had found a way to impersonate one, to produce something that poses as masterful work.
"Is It Okay to Use Grammarly?" by Dixie Dillon Lane
2/7/24
As teacher of writing, I've already come across multiple situations where a student has used AI to help create an assignment. As I read students' essays and other writing assignments, there are times when there's just a certain sixth sense that says, "This is not human writing." It's very subtle, but the sense of non-humanness is definitely there.
I found this article on the topic by Miriam Bowers-Abbott and Wyatt Abbott illuminating. Here's an excerpt:
Connectives are a large group of terms inclusive of conjunctions (such as and), prepositions (such as before), and adverbs (such as however). There is a precedent for using such terms as a means to distinguish the backgrounds of language users, often as a means to differentiate between native speakers (NS) and non-native speakers (NNS) of a language. In a comparison of student English essays by NS and NNS of French origin, Granger and Tyson (1996) found that NNS were far less likely to use a term such as “instead” in their writing. At the same time, the researchers found that NNS used a term such as “indeed” at nearly four times the frequency of NS. Ma and Wang (2016) compared essays written in English by British and American students to essays written in English by Cantonese students. In the study, researchers noted many similarities in connective usage, but also noted that NS used the term “because” with higher frequency. Kuswoyo et al. (2020) compared language usage in NS and NNS of English among engineering lecturers. The researchers found that the NNS tended to use “and” and “so” more frequently than NS in lectures.