D

September 2022 was apparently the month artificial intelligence essay anxiety boiled over in academia, after a user of an AI writing service claimed to be getting straight A's with essays "written" using artificial intelligence. Most professors expressed concern. One wrote, "Grading something an AI wrote is an incredibly depressing waste of my life."

As all this online depression was playing out, I asked my students, who were mostly majors in writing, to submit a 2,000-word proposal about a local issue. I asked them to rely on the AI as much as possible. After reviewing their 22 AI essays, I can tell you confidently that the technology just isn't there. My students used free accessible text generators online and put in a lot of effort. But, if I had believed these were genuine student essays, the very best would have earned somewhere around a C or C-minus. Many of the essays had obvious red flags for AI generation: outdated facts, quotes from prior university presidents presented as current presidents, fictional professors and named student organizations that don't exist. At the same time, the students reported that using AI required far more time than simply writing their essays the old-fashioned way would have.

There has been a fair amount written about the supposed impressiveness of AI-generated text. There are even several high-profile AI-written articles, essays or even scientific papers or screenplays that showcase this impressiveness. In many of these cases, the "authors" have access to higher-quality language models than most students are currently able to use. But, more importantly, the published examples are generally the polished form of professional writers and editors. In contrast, many of my students' AI-generated essays showed the common problems of student writing-uncertainty about the appropriate writing style, issues with organization and transitions, and inconsistent paragraphing. Obviously, producing a quality essay with AI requires having high writing skill and revising skill to produce appropriate outputs.

My experimental so tells me that a good assignment sheet is the best defense against AI essays. If your assignment is "Describe the reasons for the U. S. Civil War", you are more likely to get AI or downloaded essay submissions. My assignment was a challenge because it asked students to address local issues of concern. There are just not enough relevant examples in the data the AI text generators are drawing from.

It has been just over five years since computer scientists declared, "We should stop training radiologists(放射科医生) now. Deep learning is going to do better than radiologists." Well, we're still training radiologists, and there's no indication that deep learning is going to replace human doctors anytime soon. In much the same way, I strongly suspect full-on robot writing will always and forever be "just around the corner".