Mediocrity in human writing is not a worthy goal to celebrate (another unintended consequence of AI)
Because I have snow day (!) and some actual free time on my hands, I’d like to offer up this slightly less long-winded follow up to my previous post, At this point, I’ve spent many hours reading various articles, blog posts, and discussion forums about the effects of AI in the humanities classroom, and one recurring theme I’ve noticed is the newfound appreciation of mediocre work that has clearly been produced by actual human students themselves rather than spat ready made out of a machine. Such students–who would have thought?–are apparently the newfound heroes of the AI age.
It is not exactly hard to imagine why this is the case. For a professor who has no choice but to treat piles of AI-generated smarm as if they are in fact students’ own work, an awkwardly expressed piece of (post-)adolescent writing that shows some level of engagement with the material at hand can understandably seem like a ray of light beaming down from the heavens.
I understand this relief, and the ensuing temptation to celebrate it, but I also think it is important not to take this tendency too far. (more…)