Why We Misunderstand the Coming of ChatGPT

And What Writing is For

Is high-school English dead?

A Dec. 9 article published in The Atlantic by Daniel Herman, a high-school English teacher, says yes. Herman asserts that the new AI chat program ChatGPT drastically changes the nature of education, especially the teaching of writing. The software can respond to prompts of almost any kind—even very complicated ones—in a convincing human-like manner.

Specifically, Herman questions whether academic writing remains a relevant and teachable skill—or even a fitting metric for intelligence—now that ChatGPT can autogenerate essays that are better than most student writing. And education isn’t the only area that may be impacted by the program’s impressive abilities. The concern is that any industry, task, or job involving writing could be affected.

Certainly, ChatGPT comes to us as a force to be reckoned with. It will be harder to detect cheating, for example, and information online must be treated with even more skepticism. But this sudden outburst of concern over the future of education and other intellectual pursuits because “the computer can do it better” makes little sense. These cries of dismay could only come from a society that has lost track of what intelligence, thought, creativity, and writing really are…

Read the rest here: https://intellectualtakeout.org/2023/01/writing-the-coming-of-chatgpt/.