1. I'm not going to take the moral highroad here. He's clearly going for an IT education. I think it's great that he is exploring these options.
2. He involved me, and we're making this a great learning experience.
3. Face the facts. This goes really fast. If you don't use an AI, your essay is going to be at the bottom of the heap. I'd estimate that out of the 35 essays, maybe 25 used AI for assistance.
I don't know why you want to hobble your child. He will be generating essays but one day he will be in a situation he cannot generate an essay, he won't be able to google, like say a presentation to a client or colleagues, and he will be caught, whereas his competition who do not need a crutch to write (or for a presentation, say make arguments on his feet) will not. You certainly don't need to overwork your kid, but why even bother educating your child if this is how you approach education? May be he needs to legally finish high school, but after HS why not let him chatGPT his way into a job if you think it is sufficient?
>your essay is going to be at the bottom of the heap. I'd estimate that out of the 35 essays, maybe 25 used AI for assistance.
This is absolutely a terrible attitude. Who cares about the "top essay" if they're all AI generated. None of the 25 students are good students, and unless they will fail into a good job at daddy's hedgefund, you will simply not become a proficient adult letting chatGPT do your homework for you. The entire point of writing essays is to formulate opinions and thoughts and defend them. I understand school sucks and sometimes you have to write essays for things you don't care about, and that is a problem. But, at some point, you need to learn how to write if you want to be a professional. Not doing so just means you're holding yourself back for reasons I don't quite understand.
i agree. I think this is analogous to flying a modern airliner. After all, anyone can set the autopilot. Easy, right? Easy until a situation arises where manual flying or human intervention is required. That is when years of tedious training becomes instantly relevant, when the machine can't handle an edge case that requires a novel solution.
Can you imagine a medical doctor or an airline pilot who chatgpted his/her way into a license?
Bottom of the heap? Ai essays suck. They’re painful to read for the most part. The only reason they look good is because the average person has undeveloped writing and critical thinking skills, so that comparatively they sometimes look okay. Refusing to learn to write is the opposite of the right approach here
When I started secondary school in the UK, the home economics teacher (i.e. cooking and sewing) in the first lesson had a rant about how she absolutely did not want to see anyone write up their cooking with the phrase "I think it tasted quite nice" because it was a generic and content-free cliché.
That's the standard ChatGPT has to beat to make you look good at school.
Likewise, the average comments section is all you have to beat to seem erudite as an adult.
>Likewise, the average comments section is all you have to beat to seem erudite as an adult.
I hope you do not seriously think "comment sections" is how you measure adult scale intelligence. I admit many people are not as intelligent as they should be but that is in fact a source of many of life's ills, and if you care about your life and your society you should want better than "beating the standard."
The power of writing is that it is the way we formulate thoughts, opinions, and arguments. Language is the key way people frame their thoughts, and writing is one significant way to develop one's language skills. Writing is more than syntax, grammar, spelling and word choice--that's why you're not considered "unintelligent" for using a thesaurus or spell-check.
Anyhow, my entire point is "beating the comment section" isn't valuable as a threshold because as you hint at, it isn't really a place to find intelligent discussion.
None of those things were part of what they taught me at the mandatory school lessons, only at the entirely optional after-school "convincing communication" 45 minute session they had one time.
Actual school was basically "prove you actually read this Shakespeare play we assigned to you by mentioning some of these standard points".
As for comments sections… that they're low quality is the reason I chose them as an example, beating them necessarily improves the quality of global discourse - the people writing them don't recognise their poor quality.
I don't think this is accurate at all.
Our sales team is using ChatGPT and others to rewrite sales copy to make it more interesting and increase engagement.
If the user is a capable writer who can organize their thoughts and recognize the difference between good and bad copy, they're going to get much more coherent results from tools like ChatGPT. I'd contend that an average primary/secondary-schooler is basically expected to develop those exact skills, without which their AI generated essays will have a multitude of problems just like human-composed ones do.
> 1. I'm not going to take the moral highroad here. He's clearly going for an IT education. I think it's great that he is exploring these options.
Every developed country has a general path to education because you want well balanced citizen and not ultra specialised tools.
> 3. Face the facts. This goes really fast. If you don't use an AI, your essay is going to be at the bottom of the heap. I'd estimate that out of the 35 essays, maybe 25 used AI for assistance.
Why didn't you write his essay before AI was a thing ? They'd be on top of the heap.
Why don't you pay a cheap freelance copywriter for like 1$ an hour to write the essays ?
The goal of education, especially at that level, is to build your basic skills, not to perform and deliver
> If you don't use an AI, your essay is going to be at the bottom of the heap.
If you tell AI to write a research paper, even in an abstract field like math or philosophy where experiments are not required, it's not going to actually generate new knowledge. That's the point of learning to write papers in school--evaluating the evidence, and proposing and supporting a thesis. The AI can output something that looks like a paper, but it doesn't actually have any coherent thesis.
I do think it will become more common to use AI as a typing aid (predicting next words/phrases), but having AI actually generate the thesis and arguments of the paper is not doing anything useful. That said, even if you didn't use it at all, I'm not convinced your paper would somehow be worse than all the others, it would just take longer to write.
I don't understand or like schools that take a tough stance on computer-checking for plagarism and so on, that's just sad, but if the school thinks using this tool is cheating, then I'd avoid it.
I've already heard that schools think that chatbots are a crisis, they can't do essay hand-ins anymore due to this, but maybe there are different approaches where they can handle it. Maybe some think for example that they can see through it and grade down if it is an apparent problem for the handed-in text anyway.
They will probably have to start to test for the specific required skills in-class. Nobody is trying to test your knowledge of the multiplication table, or the trigonometric relations by allowing you to take the assignment home (or use a calculator during the test).
About (3): Being #1 in school rarely translates to #1 in life. Make it not about "winning" but a growth mindset: what can we learn today. Learn to learn and accept that we are always growing and never experts.
2. He involved me, and we're making this a great learning experience.
3. Face the facts. This goes really fast. If you don't use an AI, your essay is going to be at the bottom of the heap. I'd estimate that out of the 35 essays, maybe 25 used AI for assistance.