No, the Essay Isn’t Dead
What AI really means for teachers and students
As most of us know by now, ChatGPT — OpenAI’s latest artificial intelligence tool — is simultaneously awesome and a little unsettling. In case you haven’t read up on it yet, ChatGPT is a predictive AI that has been trained on much of the text on the internet. Basically, it’s a robot brain that has assimilated so much information that it’s creepily good at guessing what should come next in strings of text.
Much of the internet has entertained itself by throwing funny prompts at ChatGPT to see what it can come up with. It can write credible lyrics for a Snoop Dogg song about the environmental problems associated with ammonia or tell you how to get a sandwich out of a VCR in the style of the King James Bible. Fun!
Most educators I know did something a little different — we put our assignments into ChatGPT to see how good it was at completing them. I put a few of my essay prompts in there, and ChatGPT generally earned a solid B. It was better than most of my high schoolers at writing a clear thesis statement and organizing an essay with topic sentences, but it was worse at the details of history than many of them. It obviously didn’t know what we had learned in class, so its writing was pretty vague.
