Invention, out of the five canons of rhetoric, is to me the most difficult to teach. All of our materials are designed to, in Paul Elbow’s brilliant phrasing, help students play the “doubting game” – finding what’s wrong with the source, the source’s source, the strength of the argument, or the internal connection between the support and the claim. There is seldom any discussion about how to build an argument because school – no matter what level it is – has at its dark center the conviction that all graduates will be consumers, first and foremost.
Chat GPT is making the media rounds and scaring teachers and professors. Good. They are right to be afraid, as the market has created a tool that will render their terrible, consumption-based assignments useless. Good riddance to the essay that is assigned just to see if a student can remember to mention class discussion, lecture, Canvas discussion board notes, and readings in an interesting re-telling of the importance of a concept (concept’s importance pre-determined, by the way). This kind of education is exactly what Chat GPT interrupts, offering a more pleasant, more student-controlled interaction with the content of a subject.
This is just an example of the types of videos that are springing up explaining to people what Chat GPT can do in terms of teaching you things. From the point of view of teaching that we get in a film, or a TV show, this video is right. You get the information in how to do something on the spot, and it seems rather passable.
The fear is so real among all the mid professors and mid teachers out there that they are scrambling to find electronic tools to scope out if students have used Chat GPT on one of their terrible assignments. Please note that these are the same people who can barely use computers, have trouble with the internet regularly, and can never get their PowerPoint to work. This is all laughable to them: “Oh, technology!” they say to peals of laughter from colleagues. This is all funny to them, but they are all to eager to use laughably bad and cringe technology like Respondus Lockdown Browser (super-popular among my colleagues) to really catch students in the act of cheating/being evil/exposing their horribleness, etc.
These same people now feel they are qualified to understand a technology in its infancy, something that detects AI generated text (whatever that means) and then fail the student for “cheating.” But students are already getting ahead of this horrible game, spending even more precious study time preparing to protect themselves against their technically illiterate professors.
The reason student writing looks artificial and triggers the app is because you are asking students to produce flat texts. You want a report on what you think is important, professor. This processed meat assignment is exactly what Chat GPT has come for with a faster, cheaper, and better processed meat. Why are we making this again?
What Chat GPT does that is more profound is raise the question of what “education” is. What does it mean to learn? What does it mean to be educated? Perhaps instead of measuring “doing something” perhaps we should switch to this concept of “process” – something we hear administrators and professors talking about all the time without really doing the work to figure out how to measure it.
We have to realize that the people who might ask Chat GPT to write a bland and uninteresting paper in response to a bland and uninteresting “prompt” are not saying they are bad people, they are criticizing the professor’s bad assignment design. There’s nothing worth their time here, why not mail it in and spend their precious time working on something else that matters more?
Many times where I work, I’ve had students come to me confused and frustrated by the (too many) philosophy courses they are required to take in the core curriculum. I always suggest going to YouTube to find supporting lectures and material on the difficult texts they are asked to read and write about. Some of the best lecturers in the world are on YouTube, from the finest universities in the world – no artificial here in the intelligence – as students learn from the top teachers at Yale, Stanford, Oxford, and the like. Is this not a threat to the traditional university structure? Or is this not cheating?
Invention – creating something meaningful from the interaction of a mind, a perspective, a collection of texts, and an audience to reach – is the solution here. Rhetoric is the solution to this problem. Asking students to create something where they use the material of the course to make a claim or series of claims about something they care about renders Chat GPT to the level of the philosophy YouTube videos: Engagement with a source that can help spark composition.
Chat GPT is like ancient modes of teaching rhetoric. Have a look at examples, then more examples, and try to figure out why and how they work. Then you can see why something is appealing. Chat GPT is appealing because it is often pitch-perfect on certain asks. The question is why and how is that appealing to us, the human audience? If we can investigate that, Chat GPT becomes a wonderful tool to help spark more engaging, human composition.
Imagining students writing or speaking in a way that is pleasing to the professor is gross if unexamined. That’s not education. Having students think about an audience and trying to connect with them through composition is tough. That requires more than the night before, cut and paste, fourth result from Google search. Is that really worse than Chat GPT? Is it really different?
Thinking about teaching a process of creation and making something that would be pleasing to an audience, move them, and make them interested in your thoughts and ideas is what students want. It also happens to be what teaching is. It’s too bad so many colleagues spend so many hours worried about rule-breaking, unfair grades, and other such nonsense. That’s not what teaching is about. It’s about process, and figuring out how to use any arriving system or tool as such. Chat GPT – and whatever is coming after it next year – must be incorporated into our teaching, and our teaching must be oriented toward invention.