A Whole New World: A Teacher’s Warnings about Chat GTP and Open AI

The Quandary Arrives

Alright, as a teacher I was given all the warnings. “The students will use chat GTP to cheat. It's everywhere. Be cautious. It's going to ruin the teaching profession and all the students will just use it for writing instead of learning properly.” Certainly, parents should keep an eye out for such things--writing with AI is like doing math with a calculator: you're asking someone else to do it, so you won't learn how yourself.

I wasn't so concerned. There have always been ways to cheat, always essays one can download, and this was just another aspect of the process. The writing community was also abuzz, warning that computer generated manuscripts were entering the submissions pool and forcing magazines to take too long sorting them all out. Many of my author friends were joking around—having the program write bios of them that were horribly wrong. As for me, I had it do some of my research and it was flat out wrong—clearly not much of a threat yet.

At the same time, these manuscripts are proliferating. Writing conferences sometimes have a speaker explaining how to harness the power of Chat GTP to write hundreds of books. As somebody who has written 90 books the hard way, I am hardly impressed by such things. These are panels on cheating and moreover panels on creating utter garbage, filling the world with such things that nobody would want to read. They don't improve the world and they don't even have the adorable charm of young authors writing clumsy Harry-Potter-style fanfiction that at least has their heart and soul in it.

College Began

I started teaching English 1A as I usually do at the college, and this time I decided to be the up-to-date teacher and start by discussing the topic. Certainly, I added a warning to my syllabus that papers written this way would not be accepted. I also showed a PowerPoint from one of our teacher meetings, which suggested good versus bad usage of the programs. One might use it to generate ideas, to outline, to make suggestions, to grammar check. This made sense, considering that even my favorite style and grammar checker, prowritingaid.com, had incorporated this sort of technology into its programming. However, as the presentation went on, one should not use it for the entire paper, for entire sentences and paragraphs, for sharing one’s thoughts directly. The writing had to come from the students. It’s writing class, after all.

Off the semester went, and I did play with using these programs myself. Results varied. I asked it to write an essay about The Joy Luck Club, and what it produced was mostly summary, while also citing exactly which essays it had stolen chunks of material from. This was a disturbing answer in itself, as it clarified how unoriginal all of its sentences were. A fellow teacher told me that it could save me time by making PowerPoints to teach with. I tried out such a program and the problem was in fact the content. It looked good: the titles sounded amazingly clever. Underneath, there were helpful subtopics. But that was all there was: an outline with no content. It ended up looking something like this:

What does Mary Poppins teach us about Rhyme and Rhythm?

Mary Poppins teaches us a great deal about Rhyme and Rhythm.

Multiple choice: What is rhythm?

Multiple choice: Where does Mary Poppins display rhythm?

In conclusion, Mary Poppins teaches us about Rhyme and Rhythm throughout the award-winning film.

It hurts!

Further as the content repeated over and over, often incorrectly with details from the wrong franchises or sequels, I was unimpressed. I quickly unsubscribed and was forced to make all of my PowerPoints the slow way. But at least they had content in them! (Clearly this is not a great way to make presentations.)

What's Wrong with these Papers?

As I continued through the semester, a few of the students’ papers looked awfully suspicious. There was the one that looked like a beautiful outline but with no supporting facts or content in its paragraphs. This was clearly done by Chad GTP. In fact, having the essay that went with such an outline would have been lovely, but the outline as usual wasn't supported by anything.

Another paper was significantly better than other ones by the author: lovely descriptive writing on what was supposed to be a personal issue. Yet another essay seemed suspicious when each sentence was excellent on its own but didn't follow logically from the previous one as such, the paragraphs were made of lovely sentences that lead nowhere and lots of repeated structure. Clearly, the bots had struck again.

As the sun dipped below the horizon, casting a warm golden glow over the quiet beach, I found myself lost in thought, the gentle rhythm of the waves providing a soothing backdrop to my contemplation. With each step along the shore, the soft sand squished beneath my feet, the salty breeze tousled my hair, and the distant cry of seagulls filled the air.

Lost in my world, I almost missed her approach—a person emerging from the fading light, her silhouette backlit by the day's last rays. My grandma, a woman of quiet strength and unshakeable knowledge, commanded respect and admiration by simply being present. "Mind if I join you?" She inquired, her voice quiet yet firm, reminiscent of the years she had spent enduring life's storms.

I nodded, a faint smile pulling at the edges of my lips, as she sat next to me on the sand. We sat in comfortable silence, watching the sky's colors fade into a tapestry of dusky hues.

"It's moments like these that remind me of the fleeting beauty of life," she muttered, her gaze fixated on the horizon. I couldn't help but think about her words, the weight of their reality sinking into my chest like a hefty stone. In the hurry and bustle of daily life, losing sight of the simple delights and wonders that awaited us was easy.

A stranger essay, one I had not suspected a bot would create, had many phrases in nonstandard English. In fact, my first suspicion was mitigated by how terrible it sounded. However, when I ran it through several different checkers, it was revealed as computer written.

The difficulty of gun manage in the United States has been a surprisingly contentious and polarizing topic for many years. With a excessive price of gun ownership and an extended records of Second Amendment rights, the debate over gun manage has turn out to be increasingly divisive in recent years. Despite the magnificent quantity of gun-related deaths and mass shootings in the U.S.A., there remains a lack of complete gun control laws to cope with the difficulty. In this paper, I will argue in want of imposing stricter gun manage legal guidelines within the United States to reduce gun violence and prevent mass shootings. By analyzing the proof and research at the effectiveness of gun control legal guidelines, I will show the need for stronger guidelines to shield public protection.

Stricter gun manipulate legal guidelines are vital inside the United States to lessen gun violence and prevent mass shootings, as evidenced by means of the correlation between strong gun laws and decrease costs of gun deaths.

Background on Gun Control within the United States The United States has a deeply ingrained gun culture, with a sturdy emphasis on character rights to endure arms. The Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution ensures the right of residents to maintain and endure hands, which has been a central tenet of American identity for centuries. However, this proper has also brought about a proliferation of firearms within the united states of america, contributing to excessive charges of gun violence and mass shootings. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), there were over 39,000 gun-related deaths in the United States in 2019, consisting of homicides, suicides, and unintended shootings.

What? I mean, seriously, what? Granted, these come with some false positives in the checking machines, and one should ask students before being certain they have cheated. However, the roughly 10% of students who would have once cheated another way now are cheating using this new technology. And it's annoying.

Final Thoughts

What can be done? We the teachers must continue to educate, to emphasize that these papers are not well-written and that we can tell when the chat bots have been at work. Students need to understand that this counts as cheating: this is writing class and they need to be able to write papers on their own. Parents need to pass on this lesson--that without writing on one's own, one will never be able to construct good sentences and paragraphs. Further, of course, this material tends to be stolen from other people's work and the real writers don't get credit. This makes it doubly problematic.

In today's Internet-heavy era, being able to express oneself becomes more important every day. At the same time, the writing is significantly substandard: mixed and matched with no heart and no purpose to it. Because that was another problem: these essays made no attempt to support a thesis statement, with sentences on the issue that showed a lack of care for defending the topic—the sort that only a machine could generate.

With all this going on, the computers don't seem serious competition for the humans. However, we humans must keep checking and checking to make sure the students are keeping themselves honest. While teachers catch what they can, it also helps for parents to keep an eye on the process and be sure of what advice they're passing along.

Free instant checkers include https://zerogpt.cc/ https://gptzero.me/ and https://www.zerogpt.com/

Valerie Estelle Frankel has won a Dream Realm Award, an Indie Excellence Award, and a USA Book News National Best Book Award for her Henry Potty parodies. She's the author of over 90 books on pop culture, including Hunting for Meaning in The Mandalorian; The Villain’s Journey; Superheroines and the Epic Journey; and Who Tells Your Story? History, Pop Culture, and Hidden Meanings in the Musical Phenomenon Hamilton. Her Chelm for the Holidays (2019) was a PJ Library book, and now she’s the editor of Jewish Science Fiction and Fantasy, publishing an academic series for Lexington Press. Once a lecturer at San Jose State University, she now teaches at Mission College and San Jose City College and speaks often at conferences. At Athena’s Advanced Academy (online, gifted, accredited), she’s known for teaching the silly classes: Star Wars, superheroes, Hamilton, and more—with literary analysis hidden in each! https://athenasacademy.com/all-courses/