Educators: here’s one way to catch ChatGPT-generated essays
Asking the AI won’t give you a reliable answer
As a writer, I’ve been contemplating a post on this topic for some time, but a disturbing trend on the ChatGPT subreddit pushed me to actually follow through on the idea.
Firstly: I’m not using ChatGPT to write any of this, nor do I think I could, as the post relies substantially on my personal experience (more on this later). I’m also not entirely opposed to its use in certain educational & professional settings; the way I see it, it’s the next step in the evolution of tech-assisted writing.
Let’s not be completely obtuse about this. Writers, like all humans, have taken advantage of and adapted to advancing technology throughout the course of history. I’m not writing by candlelight on parchment with a feather quill and iron gall ink, nor am I writing on paper with graphite, or using a typewriter or offline word processor.
As I grew up in the 2000s & early 2010s, I did have K-12 English/language arts teachers who asked students to work without spell check enabled, just as I had K-12 math teachers who asked students to work without a calculator. But by college, none of my professors in any subject asked students to turn off spell check, and only my statistics professor asked students to use a…
