Is it real or is it AI?
Plus, an invitation to our initial AI for Innovative Schools remote gathering
BY JOHN WATSON
The New York Times ran a contest of sorts, between a writer and ChatGPT, to produce a 1,000-word short story “beach read” (the title might be surprising but the link is accurate!) NYT readers sent in suggestions for themes, and the Times ran the author’s story and the one by ChatGPT, without initially showing which was which, and invited readers to guess which story was human-generated and which was AI-generated.
It's possible that many educators are seeing enough AI-generated essays that this exercise isn’t all that interesting, but I found it to be fascinating. I encourage you to consider reading both and guessing which was which before going on to the next paragraph, because I found my experience to be more thought-provoking than I expected.
What did I find? I read both, and I immediately felt very confident that I knew which was ChatGPT and which was human-written. It turned out that I was right. Perhaps more curious was that I struggled to explain why I was pretty sure I knew which was which. Here’s what the author said in a postscript, which I found to resonate with what I had felt:
“Overall I found it to be proficient on a sentence level but clichéd, and also shallow in sentiment. To me, there’s just something missing — like the literary equivalent of fat-free cookies…”
The line “there’s just something missing” is what I felt, although I had a hard time articulating what exactly. I’ve also felt the same about AI-generated music.
The author goes on to list the efforts and research that she put into the essay over a couple of weeks, suggesting that may account for the difference in quality. Then she notes that ChatGPT wrote its essay in 17 seconds.
If you have a bit more than 17 seconds free in your day, I encourage you to try the exercise of reading both without knowing ahead of time which is which. In fact, I’d propose it as a small-group PD exercise, not just for English teachers but for everyone interested in understanding the current status of AI as an essay-generating tool.
I also caution anyone from concluding that this exercise means that AI isn’t going to be able to exceed human writing. It’s still early in the development of AI!
Recently I read a memoir by a musician in a successful band. He said something like at first we sounded like we were copying one or two bands, but as we evolved and wrote music with more influences and our own experience, eventually we began to sound different enough, that fans thought it was our sound. But it wasn’t that we all of a sudden shifted from being influenced to being 100% original, it was just that we were incorporating more into our music, so it became hard to tease out the original sources.
Something like that is likely to happen with AI generating both essays and music.
AI for Innovative Schools
The Digital Learning Collaborative is going to launch our AI for Innovative Schools Affinity Group in a few weeks. Read on if you’re interested!
The group will be a benefit for DLC members, but the first meeting will be open to anyone.
Date: September 19
Time: 3pm ET
Click here to RSVP
*Note you must be logged in as a user (free) or member (paid) to register!
DLC Affinity Groups are made up of members with common characteristics (e.g. geographic location) or interests (e.g. research or policy) who meet regularly throughout the school year by video, and in most cases f2f at DLAC. They vary with the needs of the community, with most groups working towards a goal or work product to help support or influence the field.
For our AI Affinity Group we’re trying something a bit different, holding a first meeting to explore what such a group might aim to do to be most useful to educators. If you’re interested, please join us! If you can’t make the date/time, feel free to register to receive the recording. But keep in mind that this meeting, like all Affinity Group meetings, is intended to be a shared discussion, not a presentation, so there is significant value in joining live.