BY PHILL BARNETT
MOUNTAIN CITIZEN
Artificially intelligent writing tools like ChatGPT, based on the latest language models developed by OpenAI, are taking the world of writing by storm. Professionals and amateurs alike can generate pages of written content in seconds.
And it’s really good. Scary good. I asked one such tool, Perplexity.ai to write a summary of the Martin County Water Crisis and this is what it produced in less than three seconds:
“The Martin County water crisis began in 2000 when a coal slurry spill contaminated the area’s water supply with cancer-causing disinfection byproducts and coliform bacteria [1]. Residents of Martin County have faced a water emergency comparable to Flint, Michigan, with issues such as leaks, contamination and inoperable water-token kiosks[2][3]. This has forced people in remote areas to hook up to under-resourced rural water infrastructure that was already stretched thin[4]. The crisis is a consequence of a deep-seated local economic and political power system mired in small-town politics[5].”
Each of those bracketed numbers is the online source where the AI found the information it reported back. While Perplexity.ai is geared toward short-form summaries of topics, other tools like ChatGPT and Canva’s built-in Magic Write feature can generate entire school papers, often undetectable by plagiarism software, which has Writing teachers and professional writers everywhere a bit concerned, as you might expect.
To make matters even more concerning, Microsoft just announced a multi-billion dollar investment deal with OpenAI and plans to integrate OpenAI’s state-of-the-art AI language tools into its entire suite of software, including Word. Google, already a major partner of OpenAI, is expected to do the same with its suite of tools, including Docs.
In other words, virtually everyone who uses a computer to write will soon have the power of AI writing tools at their fingertips, whether they seek them out or not.
While the initial reaction of any writing teacher or professional is likely to be fear, it is important that we embrace these new tools, which are quickly on their way to the mainstream.
Because of the ease with which a student can now conjure up a paper or free response, we must be more conscious of the tools at their disposal when giving out assignments, regardless of subject. Having taught at the high school and college levels, I’ve seen firsthand how much effort a student will put into not having to write.
But this isn’t anything new. Math teachers had to adjust when the calculator became a household tool and again when Wolfram Alpha made every math problem as solvable as a Google search. Spelling teachers don’t let their students use Spell Check when taking a test.
We can’t just ask students not to use AI writing tools. They just won’t listen and we often won’t be able to tell the difference. On top of that, nothing is stopping writing professionals from supercharging their workflow with these tools, so teaching students to use them effectively will only better prepare them for real-world writing tasks.
To make assignments bulletproof, educators will need to play around with these tools themselves and keep up-to-date with the capabilities of the software. While things will inevitably change as time goes on and language AI improves, here are a few tips for the current state-of-the-art I’ve picked up from a deep dive into tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity.ai.
Current limitations
There are currently many limitations to the language AI on which most of these new tools are built. Writing about ChatGPT for Inside Higher Ed, professor Steven Mintz said, “It’s unhelpful on topics with fewer than 10,000 citations. That factual references are sometimes false. That its ability to cite sources accurately is very limited. That the strength of its responses diminishes rapidly after only a couple of paragraphs. That ChatGPT lacks ethics and can’t currently rank sites for reliability, quality or trustworthiness.”
These limitations will not be around forever as the quality of AI writing tools will continue to improve with further research and design, but they are valuable to keep in mind when using these tools and when giving written assignments.
AI detection tools like those developed by Writer.com and Copyleaks work just like plagiarism detectors and seem to be quite accurate. Educators should strongly consider running written assignments through these checkers. However, AI-based rephrasing and rewriting tools are capable of producing a workaround.
Recent and personal events
The current iteration of AI writing tools are trained on almost all publicly available instances of writing available on the internet up to 2021. That means that asking about recent events will produce less than stunning results.
For instance, most of the language models will leave out Elon Musk’s recent purchase of the company when asked for a history of Twitter.
However, some AI like Perplexity.ai are armed with the powers of a modern search engine as well, giving them access to more current events. Though Perplexity.ai is limited to short-form answers, the information gathered from it could be fed to a long-form AI writing tool to produce a full paper.
Asking students to compare/contrast recent events becomes a much more difficult task for the AI, as it will not have access to the full context of the event without the student doing significant research to feed to the AI. For history classes, this might look like comparing past events to present ones.
The AI will stand no chance of detailing local events or landmarks that have little online presence. Personal events are also good choices as long as you ask the students to write about something verifiable. For instance, a writing teacher could ask everyone to bring in a show-and-tell item to accompany their personal narrative assignments.
The main takeaway here is to be as specific as possible. Play with AI tools to see how they handle your questions first. AI writing tools would have no problem answering “Explain the water cycle,” but they would all struggle with “Explain how the video we watched in class demonstrates the importance of the runoff stage of the water cycle.”
The AI will come up with an answer, but it’s unlikely to be the exact correct answer, making it obvious when students do not write responses themselves.
Asking students to summarize their writing without reading from their papers can also help weed out the laziest of AI users. In fact, most of the strategies we’ve been using to catch plagiarism for decades will still work here.
Citing sources
Most AI writing tools have not yet added the source-citing feature that Perplexity.ai has. On top of that, many of the sources cited by Perplexity.ai and tools like it are reference sites like Wikipedia, which are well-known to be off-limits for school papers.
Additionally, these AI will almost never use scholarly research articles for their information, springing instead for pop science and news articles.
Therefore, requiring students to cite scholarly sources takes away a major advantage of the AI writing tools currently on the market by forcing them to go through the research process.
In these instances, tools like Perplexity.ai make great research tools. Asking Perplexity for a summary of a topic is a quick way to digest the big picture while also generating links for further reading. And indeed, the webpages found at many of these links will reference legitimate scholarly sources, which the student can then dive into for deeper research.
Outlines
Perhaps the most useful component of the latest AI writing tools is their ability to generate effective outlines for writing. Many of the most common writing tasks, such as crafting a news article, are hardly more efficient when using AI tools than writing au naturale.
By the time you list all of the important details to the AI, all it has left to do is arrange the information into a digestible order.
For this reason, we should introduce these tools to students as springboards for writing rather than robots that will do their bidding.
While the immense power of AI writing tools can be overwhelming, the best way to remove the threat of a weapon is to ensure everyone is trained in safely using it, especially when the weapon isn’t going away any time soon.
If we do not train our students now while the technology is still developing, they will fall behind the rest of the world who choose to use it. And if we as educators do not understand the technology enough to craft our lesson plans around it, the students will use it behind our backs and fail to learn the lessons we are tasked with imparting to them.
It is our duty as educators to prepare young minds for the world they’ll face after graduation. That world is rapidly changing, so when we spot emerging trends like AI writing tools, we must adapt as quickly as possible.
“Your old road is rapidly agin’ / Please get out of the new one / If you can’t lend your hand / For the times they are a-changin’.” —Bob Dylan