Artificial intelligence has come to Missouri classrooms. Teachers have a new frontier | Opinion

A Sunday for a high school English teacher, opening a student’s essay, submitted online because I’ve given in to being a Google Classroom user. Perhaps there wasn’t a choice. Anyway, I’ve learned to enjoy typing comments and the lessening of the grading carpal tunnel of handwriting.

A private comment on the document from my 15-year-old scholar (at our school in suburban St. Louis, we’ve been encouraged to call our students scholars) reads: “Sorry for not having this completed on time, it’s now finished.” Informal speech, comma splice, fine. Then I read the first sentence of his essay: “There is no doubt that The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien is a painful and disturbing read.”

True, I thought. But my student wouldn’t write that sentence. Plus, it wasn’t one of the hooks I taught him to use. Sentences later: “The theme of guilt is present throughout the novel and serves as one of the main themes of the story.” The verb “serves.” Nope.

So here was my first ChatGPT essay — a work written by a popular new artificial intelligence tool that is capable of generating long pieces of text difficult to distinguish from the work of a human author. And I, foolishly, read it, writing comments like, “There’s no evidence of this. … Where did you get this idea?” or “There’s no evidence of Tim O’Brien suffering severe PTSD after the war in the book.”

Because I’ve been aware for years how students cut and paste from text they’ve found various places online, I’ve added odd sources my students must reference to confound plagiaristic impulses. And in this case, my student was supposed to analyze what we saw in the documentary called “Operation Homecoming.” His ChatGPT essay didn’t mention the film — in other words, he failed to add that to the data he gave the AI to generate the essay.

According to our school’s policy, my young scholar will have to take a failing grade and his parents and an administrator will be added to our discussion about this incident. The academic dishonesty will be documented. If he does something like this again, a permanent addition will be made to his file that won’t speak well for him while he copes with the pressures of college admissions.

I know, however, that my job is more complicated than enforcing a policy. I’m irritated at myself for reading the essay — when fed into a site called GPTZero (now bookmarked) that helps teachers identify phony text, almost every line was highlighted yellow to show where AI had done its thing. There was one non-yellow sentence: “The most affected character is Tim O’Brien himself.” I know my student didn’t write that either, because he likely would have written “effected.”

But the line rings true. The author Tim O’Brien creates a character in the book called Tim O’Brien. Sometimes I get lost differentiating between the real Tim O’Brien and his character, but in doing that hard work, I experience a powerful meaning about the theme of guilt — which is something I was trying to point to while teaching the book. My job tomorrow will be to ask my student what he thinks about writing a paper with ChatGPT.

Teachers know students are under pressure coming out of the pandemic, when they were forced to lean heavily on technology for support. So much is available with the push of a button, for good and bad — and with ChatGPT, a new temptation uncoils. It’s my job to help students understand how important that push-button decision is, to remember their world is nothing like my experiences in secondary school. Mom, ambitious for me, was my typewriting ChatGPT in the late 1970s.

I’m on no high horse. I need to ask questions, clarify, and help my student know why he must work harder to understand what is painful and disturbing in a book like “The Things They Carried” — even if to him, ChatGPT is a seemingly weightless addition to his backpack.

This story was originally published February 22, 2023 at 5:00 AM.