ChatGPT and The Future of Writing
Academic misconduct and ghostwriting just got orders of magnitudes easier: ChatGPT, a freely accessible webtool, can generate texts of different lengths in response to seemingly arbitrary questions. (Not to be outdone, Google is set to deploy a similar system shortly.) Unsurprisingly, therefore, universities and schools around the world have been scrambling to come up with an appropriate response to this brave new world of AI. I know, because I am in the process of developing an online course, and thus very much part of these discussions. The trouble is: what IS the appropriate response here?
To see the answer, we need to start by noticing that there are in fact two different issues to worry about here.
The first one is cheating. It used to be that asking students to write an essay—on the cultural presumptions of Rawls’s Theory of Justice, say—was a good way to check both their understanding of an issue or text and their ability to reason about it. No longer, it would seem. Students can just type “Is Rawls Theory of Justice premised on Western values?” into ChatGPT and get their essay that way. Reading Rawls (or any philosophy for that matter) has become entirely supererogatory.
Surprisingly, perhaps, this cheating issue is actually not the major concern raised by ChatGPT. In fact, this is just the latest iteration of an age-old phenomenon: ghostwriting, plagiarism, and copying. These have been around since the dawn of writing, and ChatGPT just adds convenience to this process. To be sure, in practice, dealing with the cheating made possible by ChatGPT raises some tricky issues (we cannot turn off the internet on campus!). In principle, though, the idea that some students may sometimes try to submit work that is not their own is not new and does not call for a radical rethink into how we approach learning (and living).
No, what is tricky about the development of ChatGPT is the fact that it seems to call into question the very nature of writing. What is the point of me agonizing over the structure of an Op-Ed essay, when I can just tell ChatGPT to do it for me?
Indeed, some might think this is the exact right conclusion to draw here: we should stop worrying too much about writing things. Let the computer do it and get on with the rest of our lives! Given the existence of ChatGPT—and its even more powerful descendants—asking students to learn how to write essays can seem anachronistic, like asking them to learn how to use a fax machine. In the future, that’s just not something they will be asked to do, by employers or wider society.
However, this is actually the wrong conclusion to draw here.
For there is more to writing than just communicating an existing idea. If I know what question I want answered, or what people have said about some particular topic, then ChatGPT may be a useful timesaver. However, this overlooks another key function of the writing process: being a guide to our thinking. Oftentimes, we don’t even know what questions to ask, or what we think about different answers to these questions. In this case, writing our thoughts down can really help. Doing so frees up cognitive space: we don’t have to remember the idea but can look at it dispassionately from the outside. Writing our thoughts down also forces us to formulate them within the confines of a fixed structure—language—and order them so that others might understand them. All of these are crucial components in making clearer what these thoughts are to begin with.
It is for this reason that the death of writing has been overstated. Sure, in the future, AI might think for us, too. However, for now, writing is here to stay. This is also why asking students to write essays remains a good idea: it teaches them to think. Knowing how to write an essay is useful not just because it helps to communicate ideas. It is also helpful for figuring out what ideas we have in the first place. And that’s not something an AI can do for us (at least in the foreseeable future).