[welshwelsh]

This seems so backwards to me.

If it's so easy to just copy and paste an essay from an AI generator that is of such high quality that it cannot be detected, then why are we still making students learn such an obviously obsolete skill? Why penalize students for using technology?

Surely, there are still things that are difficult to do even with the help of AI. Teach your students to use these tools, and then raise the bar. For example, ask your art students to make complex compositions or animations that can't be handled by Midjourney without significant effort.

[staunton]

The reason it's done is to teach students how to think. By writing down their thoughts they are forced to think about a topic. It's the same reason small children are still taught arithmetic although we have calculators.

That's the theory, anyway. In practice students learn that "really thinking for themselves" in essays is usually not rewarded while paraphrasing some reading assignments with some sprinkled quotations works much better and is less work than thinking about topics they don't care about.

Maybe the AI stuff will lead to practice better approximating the theoretical goal.

[professoretc]

> If it's so easy to just copy and paste an essay from an AI generator that is of such high quality that it cannot be detected, then why are we still making students learn such an obviously obsolete skill? Why penalize students for using technology?

That's like asking, why do we have students do PE (physical education) when professional athletes exist? Clearly, having students play basketball is obsolete, because the NBA exists. Essay-writing is PE for thinking.

[hxugufjfjf]

The difference is that GPT can convince the teacher that the student is a competent essay-writer, but can’t convince the PE teacher that the student is an NBA player.

[nemo]

>why are we still making students learn such an obviously obsolete skill?

Just because a machine can generate an essay of questionable quality with a fair chance of containing hallucinations making it unusable for many fields of human endeavor doesn't mean that writing is no longer a useful pedagogical tool. Learning to write is a part of learning to think.