A.I. and Our English Class

Any time I tell someone I teach college English, I get the same question. Not “How do you get through reading all those papers?” Not “Are students less prepared than they used to be?” Not even “Freshmen are a fun bunch, aren’t they?” No, the question is always “What are you doing about Artificial Intelligence?”

It’s a fair question, and it’s being asked on every college campus in the country. Before I get around to answering it, I want to deal with a couple of other questions.

Why is A.I. so appealing?

I don’t think most of my students sat down in April and said to themselves, “I think I’ll cheat my way through college.” The problem, though, is that many high schools have not done much with teaching students how to actually write things (your teachers may not have known either), and then you get to college and you’re in a do-or-die situation. You MUST pass this course to keep your scholarship and stay in school, but you have no clue how to do it—and for many students (especially the athletes), there simply is not enough time to do everything correctly. AI seems like a perfect answer—it’s a victimless crime.

AI, however, is like having your Italian grandmother over for dinner and promising to cook something to show off—but bringing out a bag from Olive Garden. “Here, grandma! I cooked this for you!” You can imagine her reaction. “The sauce tastes like paint! The pasta is like dead worms! We never put meatballs in the sauce! I taught you better than this! You didn’t cook it, did you? What are you trying to pull?”

An earlier question: What are we actually trying to do in English class?

I will let you in on a little secret. For years my students have been submitting their papers through Blackboard and I have been saving them. I also have books on my shelf, bound volumes of essays by E.B. White, James Thurber and others. I have no “paper hunger” to get more stuff to read.

Here is another little secret. I do not assume that every one of you showed up as a perfect, well-rounded writer. That would be like coaching Little League and assuming all the children start off batting like Babe Ruth, Ted Williams, or Barry Bonds. The truth is that some of the children arrive batting like Charlie Brown’s hero, Joe Shlabotnik (.004 batting average). The point of a Little League batting coach is to help the kids get better. That’s the point of this course, to help you get better.

While I am revealing little secrets, here is another. When a piece is published in a magazine such as The New Yorker, it is never a solo production. When E.B. White wrote a piece, Harold Ross would go over it and blue-pencil changes. It would usually go back and forth several times. Then a copy editor would go over the piece to fix the grammar and correct factual errors. Finally, when the piece was almost ready to print, a proofreader would go over it and make sure the spelling and punctuation were correct. E.B. White, one of the best essayists ever, wrote for The New Yorker for 49 years. That’s a lot more experience than you have. It’s asking a lot to expect a college freshman, working alone, to equal all that professionalism. All I can expect is for you to begin working on the craft and striving to improve your game. (Note: This is also why almost all of the readings in this course are from students, not professionals—I want you to see what people like you can do.)

So to answer the question, we are not looking for a stack of perfect, professional-grade essays. We are looking for a stack of college students who are better at writing now than they were at the start of the course.

Now to answer the original question: What am I doing about AI?

• The most basic answer is to work on structure and procedure. The major emphasis of this course is “How To.” Some of it might seem very elementary: If I wanted to teach you how to make a good cup of coffee, I would start off by asking you to find a clean cup. We will lean on some very basic writing ideas: thesis and support. If you already have those nailed, great—but not everyone does.
• I want to work against some of the cultural ideas that fight you. For a very long time, freshman mythology has said that papers should be written no earlier than midnight before the due date. Not so! This course will work on the process and on scheduling. Another freshman myth is that a good piece of writing emerges perfect in one step, like an egg from a hen. Nope! It’s usually a process more like making a sculpture—a bit here and a bit there, and then correcting the mistake from yesterday. We are going to work on editing and revision.
• The people who ask the question which began this article usually suggest in-class handwriting as a way to counter the AI temptation. And they are right. As a matter of fact, Dr. Grady, the Director of Composition at Ashland, wants us to require several in-class handwritten essays each semester. I have heard that other departments have the same rule and other colleges are doing the same. (To tell the truth, when I was a student, in-class handwritten essays were normal in almost every course.)
• AI essays do not usually have a “smoking gun” that screams you copied them from a robot, but they are rarely very good. I would say C minus is the most typical grade (and some are lower). I cannot often point to a specific thing and say “AHA! You got ChatGPT to write that!” (It used to be possible, but ChatGPT has cleaned up its act.) What I can do, however, is to grade the paper on its merits and ask you to discuss the content of your paper in class.

Will AI ever be useful to a college student?

One of Ashland University’s slogans is Teaching students how to think, not what to think. Thinking is difficult work, and following that “how to think, not what to think” bit is really tough for most people. However, simply pushing a button and downloading someone else’s thought (whether from a person or a machine) does not move you toward that skill.

We are still in the very early stages of AI, so we do not know where it will go, but in the short term, I can see it being useful as a research assistant and perhaps an organizing tool. We have been through this before. When the first word processing programs got the ability to check spelling, English departments were wondering if it was ethical to allow students to use them. After all, a “well educated person” should know how to spell. Now, however, we let students use spelling and grammar checking programs and even style checking programs. But those are just tools, and it’s a big jump from fixing bad spelling and avoiding “gonna” in a formal paper to letting the machine write it all for you. After the program has straightened out your spelling, the piece still needs to be yours. I think (and hope) that’s where AI will eventually land.

My aim in this course is to help you to think and write on your own.