More Human Thoughts

 The Chatbot making the rounds has inspired a sheaf of thought and writing, and the irony isn't lost on me. A few have even begun to try and contextualize the quantum leap forward in natural language chatting and essay writing that the GPT 3.5 system has introduced.

If you recall, my concern isn't that students can pass work off as their own, but that those who receive the work will be ok with that because the skill of writing qua writing will no longer be deemed essential. As such, we can leave the essay writing for the computers because students will have ubiquitous technology to perform such menial tasks as composing a response to literature. My fear is that by exempting students from learning the skill, we will miss the opportunity to inculcate fundamental and exportable thinking skills. Paralleling this technology to the use of a calculator, students can rely on having a phone or a computer or an actual calculator so they need not understand either how to add 2 and 2 or what it means to compute and consider the relationships between values. There is a utility of mathematical thinking which is lost if we can jump to getting the answer automatically. Understanding what it means to solve for x is as valuable as actually solving for x. The same holds true for writing.

It isn't about comma splices and tense agreement. It is about organizing thoughts in your own brain before you commit them to paper. We have to train the brain to make the choices which will most efficiantly distill experience and emotion and help us create with others. Writing is a tool towads thinking so we can't expect one without the other. Writing is, like any applied grammar or vacabulary, a method of acculturation and assimilation into a society. Following the agreed upon norms demonstrates an ability to integrate, to subsume the self within the greater good of membership in the collective. It shows a consciousness of the decision to encode in a way that can be decoded by a particular audience. Only by understanding the rules of rhyme and rhythm can one choose to exercise poetic license and break the rules. Only by understanding sense can one choose to employ nonsense as a communicative tool. To be illogical, to express on whim and not by dint of algorithm is a cultivatable skill, unless we decide that we don't value the individual voice.

Maybe we need to rethink the value of writing for the regular person. Maybe we have to be bold enough to say that the average person does not need to think and the stratification of society which we apply to every other field applies to English as well. Not everyone is an artist. Not everyone is a mathematician. Not everyone is an athlete. And the product each of the experts can create is approximatable by technology. But the value in the human expression is something we admire and which is resident in only a small group. Anyone can learn to play a scale on a piano, or do basic addition or even to stack bricks. But not everyone has a complex story to tell, or any interest in computing interest, or designing a building. So maybe we should rework the entire educational curriculum. Eliminate all that can be performed by technology and leave only the specialized and advanced classes for those who gravitate to that. So for the "math people" out there, by the time 7th or 8th grade rolls around, the few left will automatically struggle and succeed through more advanced classes because they WANT to, and they won't have to waste any time learning about covalent bonds, the French Revolution or the ablative case.

Should we start by assembling data from other fields? Do we ask math teachers if students are having more or less success at the more advanced levels of math because/despite their inability to interpolate logorithms, solve formulae or multiply two-digit numbers in their heads? Can we expect students to be able to evaluate, assess and even correct material that they can't initially create? Should we be expecting a continued dumbing down of society and yet still complain about it?

And all of this broaches another reality -- the AI relies on both programming and a data pool of information. Though it can be programmed to evaluate the content, it cannot judge on any sort of humanistic level. Its rules are rules and it has no gut to follow. If it does, in any sense, have that "instinct" it does only as a function of the programming and the programmer. Thus, its built in value system is a reflection of, even a projection of the person who put in the code and set the rules. This, then, reinforces the social structure -- the well educated computer person imposes his vision of right and wrong, good and bad and valuable and useless onto the measuring system, so the computer, when it generates text, simply expresses the views of its creator under the guise of impartiality.

I have no doubt that by now, computers can generate lovely melodies, draw pictures both highly realistic and incredibly abstract. A computer can produce beautiful writing. If not now, then soon, computers will generate combinations of words which follow grammatical rules and even embody the stylistic and inexpressibly emotional elements which we cannot teach but which some programmer used as a driving ethos when he taught the computer to create content, and the pool of raw data and precedenting material upon which the computer bases its creations is broad enough that the computer can invoke styles and types which run the range of human experience. But all that means is that we will exempt humanity from the struggle to do the same thing and find its own level on a person-by-person basis, develop its own voice and create content of which it can be proud.

So let me bottom line, tl;dr it for you. The English classroom must continue and writing must needs continue to be taught not because we think that the creation of essays and responses is necessarily a valuable skill, nor because we worry that students will be without technology, stranded on a deserted island, and yet still need to write a cover letter for a job application. But writing must be taught because we want students to be able to rise from their status as intellectual have-nots and unlock the more complex thinking that stands on the shoulders of whatever genius lives within each of us. We won't know who is "not a writing person" if we abandon the activity before it has a chance to blossom.

previous thoughts (even tangentially) on the matter

https://rosends.blogspot.com/2013/08/blenderized-learning.html

https://rosends.blogspot.com/2014/12/look-it-up.html

https://rosends.blogspot.com/2017/11/what-hath-internet-wrought.html

https://rosends.blogspot.com/2018/03/2-rantz.html