AI essays

“’If you think the AI output looks like a good paper,’ I tell my students, ‘you don’t know what a good paper is.’ It is bad enough when students don’t grasp the working methods and critical premises of literary study, but it is our job to teach them those things, not to abandon them as antiquated when a shiny toy comes along.” Thus Ben Parker at Public Books in his piece entitled AI=B+. The virtue of this piece is its grounding in reality, its willingness to look at actual evidence. Sam Altman, head OpenAI, may well claim that ChatGPT is able to spew forth words at “a legitimate PhD-level expert in anything”, but we should possibly take a look at that axe ready for grinding that he’s hiding behind his back. Professor Parker, of Brown University, has checked the evidence, and reports that “the essays it produced in mere seconds are quite plausible as the last-minute work of a rushed undergraduate. Its prose is at once eerie and banal, its analysis unswervingly trite, but full of…