Source: The Dispatch
by Alan Jacobs
“One of the favors that chatbots have done for humanities professors is to reveal to us that chatbots are so good at doing the thesis-essay assignment because it has always been an exceptionally formulaic thing. If we engage in a little self-examination, we’ll realize that we like it formulaic, because that reduces the time and mental energy we have to invest in grading. It’s easy to compare any given student’s essay to the template in your mind and quickly see the extent to which it matches or deviates from it. The rise of the chatbots — with their algorithmic pattern-matching, their stochastic parrot behavior — has revealed that students and faculty alike have been, for many decades, functioning in exactly the same way. If we could confront our chatbots the way parents confront their kids about drug use, the bots would surely reply ‘I learned it by watching you!'” (03/04/26)
https://thedispatch.com/article/artificial-intelligence-college-essay-teachers-innovation/