Sinduja Ragunathan

I looked to research for hope (or the absence of it). There have not been many studies yet on how the pedagogy of teaching creativity will shape up in the wake of ChatGPT. One study did find that readers did not mind whether an interesting article was produced by a machine or a human and rated the same level of enjoyability for both (Landa-Blanco et al., 2023). Another study found that there are still structural and organization issues with the text produced by ChatGPT (Dergaa et al., 2023). Yet, this is a gap that could be easily improvised in later versions.

Above is a slideshow comparing the work of a 8-year old student vs. ChatGPT for a similar story prompt. (OpenAI, 2023).

However, on further thought and exploration with the tool, I realized that writing too can be functional or expressive in format and intent. While functional items such as emails, business reports, news summaries will soon be easily automated, the expressive formats will still bear the stamp of human originality.

As Noam Chomsky writes for the NYT, “ChatGPT and its brethren are constitutionally unable to balance creativity with constraint. They either overgenerate (producing both truths and falsehoods, endorsing ethical and unethical decisions alike) or undergenerate (exhibiting noncommitment to any decisions and indifference to consequences). He concludes that the current hype that human creativity is getting obsolete is laughable.

Meanwhile, there is so much we can use to exercise our creative muscle with a little aid from AI (Rudolph et al., 2023). As a writing teacher, it perhaps becomes much easier for me to collate resources, generate writing prompts, generate sentences with specific vocabulary for practice, and so on. Working together with students, this is also a good opportunity to have discussions on critical digital literacy around generative AI. All the same, I am also happy that for students who might not have English as a language they are comfortable with, it becomes easier to showcase their ideas without being penalized for language.

End of the day, I believe that every skill we gain develops an array of auxiliary skills. A student who takes time to draft and structure an essay from scratch also develops clarity of thought and fluency in expression. Artists and composers and writers who create work for the joy of it will continue to bring valuable contributions in ways that only a human mind can.

References

Dergaa, L., Chamari, K., Zmijewski, P., & Ben Saad, H. (2023). From human writing to artificial intelligence generated text: Examining the prospects and potential threats of ChatGPT in academic writing. Biological Sport, 40(2), 615-622.

Landa-Blanco, M., Flores, M. A., & Mercado, M. (2023). Human vs. AI Authorship: Does it Matter in Evaluating Creative Writing? A Pilot Study Using ChatGPT.

Rudolph, J., Tan, S., & Tan, S. (2023). ChatGPT: Bullshit spewer or the end of traditional assessments in higher education? Journal of Applied Learning & Teaching. 6(1). 45-52.