ChatGPT and Academic Anxieties

ChatGPT has made academics anxious all over the world. There are two main kinds of responses that ChatGPT has elicited in academia.

On the one hand are writing teachers who are concerned their students will use ChatGPT to cheat on their exams.

There are also academics who refuse to engage in any sort of conversation on the topic of ChatGPT. They are against it and they don't even want to talk about.

Last week, I did a thread on how to use ChatGPT intelligently and ethically for academic purposes. The thread went "viral."

In that thread, I talked about using ChatGPT to create "structure" and not "content." You can read the thread by clicking on the tweet below.

I shared the thread with one of my academic colleagues.

"It's BS, even this idea of structure," they wrote.

This colleague would've never made such a comment had I asked them for feedback on a draft of my journal article. Perhaps because it's a Twitter thread about ChatGPT and not "serious" scholarship that my colleague felt they could say such a thing.

If academics are angry and anxious over ChatGPT, many students have assumed, rather naively I must add, that they won't have to learn to write. They think they can just feed ChatGPT a prompt, copy-and-paste the answer, and their job is done.

In Hindi-Urdu, there is a saying that can loosely be translated as: "Only the wise can imitate."Or"You must be smart to cheat."

Both of these are extreme responses that leave little room for nuance.

More importantly, an app like ChatGPT highlights a fundamental flaw in the pedagogical model used to teach writing.

Let me give you an example. Last semester, I taught a course on academic writing at a Pakistani university. It was a core course that meant every student had to take it to graduate.

The students in my class were all bright, young people, but most of them couldn't care less about the course. Despite my repeated reminders, most students seldom showed up on time and rarely took interest in what I had talk about. Some even had their noses buried in their phones during lectures.

The reason most of my students didn't pay any attention was they didn't see any value in learning the craft of writing. All they wanted was a "good" grade.

And I don't blame them.

They may not have to write a single academic essay after they graduate. A student may end up running her gym, another may become a TikToker, and that way may not have to think about what a topic sentence is for the rest of their lives.

But imagine, if I had only five (or even less) students who were willing to learn writing because they saw value in learning it. Things would've been very different.

The fundamental flaw in our pedagogical model is we make writing courses compulsory. We shouldn't.

Nothing should be made compulsory for any student at any level. A school/college/university should create an environment that encourages young people to explore and discover their own selves and not try to fit predefined slots.

It is this carceral pedagogical model where schools and teachers police young people that an app like ChatGPT challenges. Ideally, this model should be done away with.

But we don't live in an ideal world.

This means that schools/teachers will continue policing students and students will continued to find ways to dodge and game the system.

While teachers and students continue their cat-and-mouse, ChatGPT is only going to get better and smarter.

So, how do we think about it?

The fact that my thread on how to use ChatGPT intelligently and ethically went viral tells me that people want to have a nuanced conversation on what AI-powered apps mean for the future of writing and academia in general.

The only way to move forward is to engage in a robust debate with an open mind. We won't gain much if we try to shut down the conversation by saying it's BS like my colleague did.

And while we continue talking about ChatGPT, let's try to find ways to end the carceral model of teaching writing.

I'd love to know what you think of ChatGPT and the future of teaching academic writing. Please feel free to write to me at [email protected]. You can also follow me on Twitter @MushtaqBilalPhd.

And before you go, I'd like to share Rowan Cheung's newsletter The Rundown dedicated to the latest development in the field of artificial intelligence. You can read it by clicking below.See you next week.