Chatbots won’t kill the college essay
The other day, I opened my laptop and discovered that a new artificial intelligence program may soon make my job obsolete.
I teach writing to first-year college students at Rice University, and just as I prepared to celebrate the end of a long semester, a headline in a major magazine offered me this bad news: “The College Essay is Dead.”
The article turned out to be more nuanced than its headline, but there was no escaping the central fact: GPT-3, the newest version of a program called ChatGPT, can now allow anyone anywhere to generate high-level writing on any topic without having to actually write anything. And there was no escaping the subtext, either. Once students become aware of this new technology, writing an essay will require approximately as much thought and effort as using the ice dispenser on somebody’s refrigerator. And writing teachers like me will go the way of ice cutters, a once-common occupation that now seems hilariously antiquated.
It’s an odd sensation to learn that the skill you’ve devoted yourself to practicing and teaching may soon be automated. My first reaction was a mix of denial and dread. No way the college essay would go extinct, I thought, but what would I do if it did? I couldn’t go back to teaching high school English in HISD, a job I loved, since another headline in the same magazine offered more bad news: “ChatGPT Will End
High-School English.” What would happen to the thousands of us who teach writing at secondary schools, colleges and universities, if all the doomsday headlines are correct and writing becomes a task that people can easily outsource to their computers?
But then I thought about my students. This semester I taught a first-year writing seminar called “Making Sense of Ourselves,” a course focused on the personal essay. Reading the work of classic essayists like Michel de Montaigne, James Baldwin and Annie Dillard (not to mention contemporary writers like Jenny Zhang and Leslie Jamison), my students and I get to witness
how writing can be a way of making sense of one’s own life and exploring what it means to be human. And they get to make sense of their experiences and the world around them in their own writing.
For example, one of my students this semester wrote an excellent essay about “A Hanging,” George Orwell’s essay about witnessing an execution while working as a prison guard in the country that is now Myanmar. Her essay wrestled with the causes and consequences of moral passivity, and she connected this to her own experiences growing up in Myanmar at a time of civil war. Another student wrote about Richard Rodriguez’s
“Aria: A Memoir of a Bilingual Childhood.” Her essay powerfully rejects Rodriguez’s argument against bilingual education, but she also explores the “quiet, isolated conflict” that both she and Rodriguez experienced as young Spanish speakers learning English in school. These academic essays were motivated by personal experiences, and in both cases the writing process allowed the students (and their teacher) to discover more about themselves and the larger world.
This idea of writing as a vehicle for discovery is common among teachers, but it seems to be largely absent from the most dire predictions about the fate of college writing. People who assume that technology will make the college or high school essay obsolete seem to view writing merely as a product or a lifeless method of evaluation, not a process or a way of learning.
But writing teachers typically offer students guidance over the course of multiple drafts, emphasizing that the process is at least as important as the product. In other words, writing is a way of thinking through important topics, not just a way of sharing our thoughts after we’re done thinking. (I’m figuring out my own thoughts on writing and technology even as I’m writing this paragraph.) There’s something genuinely thrilling and uniquely human about discovering our own elusive thoughts as we write.
At its best, the act of writing and revising allows us to surprise ourselves, challenge our assumptions, change our minds, wrestle honestly with complex and difficult issues and maybe even articulate something that we’ve never been able to articulate before. You can’t get that experience from using a chatbot. The writing teacher’s job is to create the conditions that allow students to see writing as a meaningful and even occasionally enjoyable act. If we can do that, the vast majority of students won’t want to outsource their work to anyone — or any thing — else.