Post #2545140

I'm glad I'm not teaching any more. It was already daunting dealing with the relentless socialization of students to make them produce bullshit, even without the availability of text generators. I used to be able to recognize Wikipedia-speak at a distance, and once gave a kid's father an F for what he did to the young man's paper (he was a magazine publisher, and apologized, and I gave his son a good grade on the replacement). It is actually not a completely new phenomenon; I myself passed some of my college courses with relentless pages of nonsense, even though I was writing it by hand on lined paper without the aid of anyone else's text. The difference is that now, it's really easy to generate the stuff. It used to take work. The heart of the problem is partly that we don't actually want real human writing in most classes. We want something plausible. And ChatGPT and its cohort produce plausibility--plausibility and gloss. Teachers have a hard time accepting that real human beings, whether they are middle schoolers or graduate students, write awkwardly and with many errors. I learned to love that kind of writing, because I knew it was real and because the writer had been thinking as they wrote.