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When it comes to AI’s place in the classroom — and its role in education broadly — some professors are at the end of their rope. The not quite all-knowing but incredibly adept at bullsh*tting chatbots let lazy students churn out entire essays, solve math problems, and cobble together passable answers for most questions. Needless to say, none of that leaves much room for actual learning.
Such desperate times call for Draconian measures. In a roundup of instructor testimonials on the AI’s impact on their profession from The New Yorker, one pedagogue is taking no prisoners when it comes to punishing pupils who surrender their brains to the tech.
“I tell students that ChatGPT is disallowed from their writing process, that I can immediately tell when ChatGPT has been used, and that I will fail the student on this assignment if it is used — and, potentially, for the entire course, if we go through a formal appeals process,” Neal Hebert, a theatre professor at Grambling State University, wrote to the magazine.
Hebert has an even more merciless warning for theater majors.
“I tell my theatre majors, ‘I get paid the same whether I pass you or fail you,’” he wrote. “‘But what you’ve just done is told me and everyone else in our department that you are so lazy you would rather outsource your collaboration to an app than risk being an artist.’”
Tough love is not something Hebert undertakes with glee, but the overwhelming tide of AI cheating in his introductory classes has left him no choice, he feels.
“I’ve stopped being a collaborator in these intro courses and started being a plagiarism cop, and I do resent that a bit,” he lamented. “I wanted to be the kind of professor my professors were for me.”
Some professors try a different tack, allowing moderate experimentation with AI, and more forgiving forms of chastisement. Daniel Silver, a professor of sociology at the University of Toronto, Scarborough, framed it as a learning opportunity — for the instructors.
“AI has fundamentally changed how I teach, and it demands basic reflection about what we are trying to accomplish,” Silver told The New Yorker.
Silver said he spent a lot of time this academic year coming up with new types of assignments that call for more creative uses of AI, such as creating and experimenting with AI agents that represent famous thinkers like Adam Smith.
“Beyond that, students still would use AI in a thoughtless way, as a replacement for their thought and judgment,” Silver wrote in his testimonial. “So I made a point to just call them on it, and make them meet with me personally.”
After talking with the students, Silver would give them a zero on the offending assignment but also a chance to redo it. “They usually improved, but not always,” he said. To drive the point home, he would show them AI-generated assignments to demonstrate how the “they all kind of look the same.”
AI caused him a lot of “emotional upheaval,” Silver admitted, “but I do feel we all, including the students, are learning how to live with it, and we’ll come out better on the other side.”
Hebert is less optimistic. Whatever ounce of good-feeling he still possessed was shot down when he read his student’s papers on “Fences,” a Pulitzer-winning 1985 play by August Wilson.
“Out of forty students, the vast majority chose similar words, phrasing, and concepts, and most papers were written in that inimitable ChatGPT style: ‘This isn’t a simple story about injustice — it’s a clarion call for a positive understanding of justice,’” he wrote, comparing LLM’s prose to “elevator muzak, but in words.”
Rather than integrating AI, he’s fortifying his classroom against it. The assignment is now based on plays too obscure for ChatGPT and other AI models to know about.
“If ChatGPT is used on these assignments now, it hallucinates characters, plotlines — it just makes sh*t up, since it has nothing to go on,” Hebert told the magazine.
Still, this hasn’t completely discouraged AI cheating, even in Hebert’s upper level courses. And it’s causing him to have nightmares of what the tech’s long term implications for theater as an artform will be, if students “can’t be bothered to read and think about the plays they are performing in.”
“Can you imagine AI Performing Arts Slop? The theatrical equivalent of the images ChatGPT and its competitors spit out, soulless and inert, arriving on stage stillborn?” he asked. “I can.”
More on education: Parents Explode in Fury at School’s Plan to Constantly Film Their Children to Train AI
