Concerning: Rightful authorship is one of the questions hovering over AI use in education. — 123rf.com
AS a language teacher, have you ever gone through a student’s written assignment and shaken your head at the numerous language errors, misspelt words, and simply bad writing?
And have you asked yourself if you somehow failed in the language education of your students, despite having invested time, effort and energy in teaching, and incorporating various methods and resources?
A colleague of mine told me that she used to brace herself for another piece of hard-to-understand and full-of-mistakes assignment submission by some of her postgraduate students.
“But not anymore,” she said with a laugh over our usual teh tarik in a café.
“Lately, almost every piece is written in perfect English with well-organised paragraphs and expertly crafted sentences. Even the ideas are much better than I used to receive. But frankly,” she continued with a sigh, “I don’t know whether to be relieved or concerned.”
I understood where she was coming from. Until quite recently, I often found myself pondering the language choice in the reports submitted by my students or even staff.
And there were the emails and text messages that required me to interpret what the senders had intended to mean.
The phrase “stop the rot” ran through my mind whenever I saw substandard written work being held up as shining literary examples.
But it is not the case anymore. My friend said almost all the student work she receives has gone through language applications that do paraphrasing and grammar checks and, in some cases, restructure entire paragraphs. “It’s a bit like photoshopping,” she said somewhat dryly. “You know how images can be edited with the not-so-perfect bits digitally enhanced to make you look like a beauty pageant finalist. In a way, the same principle applies. Who’s to pass judgement?”
With the availability of numerous artificial intelligence (AI) tools that not only help to paraphrase, reorganise, edit and proofread content, but also organise research and even generate ideas, the quality of written submissions should by all reasoning have improved by leaps and bounds in education institutions.
There are definite advantages of incorporating such tools. Apart from saving time and enhancing quality and accuracy, these tools can give feedback on written work.
Since its launch late last year, the ChatGPT chatbot has been making waves in the education scene and it seems like education will never be the same anymore.
With the sophisticated algorithms that power it, ChatGPT is able to generate text, including essays, reviews, reports, and even literary pieces, depending on the prompts given.
Reactions among educators to this AI tool are mixed. While some have welcomed ChatGPT with open arms, embracing it as a solution to many of their work-related challenges, others are more hesitant about it.
Questions hover over aspects of integrity, plagiarism, and the possible limitations to human creativity and critical thinking.
Also, when it comes to the question of authorship, who then is the actual author of the written work – is it the human who feeds the tool at regular intervals with the relevant keywords, or the tool itself?
Some teachers initially experimented with ChatGPT to “catch it out”, or to prove that it can’t really do every writing task in the world as others have claimed.
In the end, however, they admitted to having succumbed to its power to enable them to complete their writing-related tasks in less than half the time it would ordinarily take them to finish.
“Who doesn’t want that?” exclaimed a teacher who testified to having “written” 20 testimonials in less than half an hour using ChatGPT.
“Usually, it would have taken me at least one week. Talk about efficiency!”
While it is almost undeniable that AI has made writing assignments much less daunting for many people, the question now is whether all writing compositions are necessarily “better” just because they are wonderfully organised with perfect syntax and completely free of language errors.
Perhaps it is a bit like what my friend said. You view a digitally enhanced image of a person, and you begin to wonder what the real person looks like.
Perhaps, all things considered, we would rather read something that has been written by a human, despite the mistakes it may carry – just as we would prefer to be attended to by a human speaking on the other end of the phone line instead of an automated voice.
For me, I never thought I would say this but I actually miss the emails that I used to receive. Even if they had multiple language errors and lacked organisation, I knew they were written by actual people and there was an undefinable element of a soul in the text, which I find difficult to detect from any machine-generated message no matter how articulate it is.
One day perhaps, humans may think they can perceive the soul of the machine but it will probably only be the reflection of their own souls that have slowly and indiscernibly been caught up within the coils of the machine.
Dr G. Mallika Vasugi, who currently teaches at a local university, provides insights into the teaching profession. The views expressed here are the writer’s own.
