The emergence of text generating Ai in the contemporary classroom presents numerous problems for the contemporary writing professor. Students using AI to plagiarize their work being the most pragmatic of these issues. How can I, a (lowly?) human possibly detect the work of robots and discern that work from that of my fellow man? While many look for reactive solutions, to try and make these judgment calls while grading, there may be preventative measures we should take first.

Asking why students use text generative AI to do their homework may seem like a foolish question, one may think that students obviously use AI because they’re lazy. It’s easy to see why one might think that unmotivated, dragging, disengaged students can plague our classrooms. I for one, end up spending more time thinking about my disengaged students than my engaged students. Engaged students do everything I ask, disengaged students do not, which requires me to ask more of them.

However, I think this type of thinking can lead to bias surrounding our explanations for student use of generative AI. Talking about, and using Ai with my students made me realize that while they may balk at the idea of writing a three page essay, ultimately, they prefer using AI simply because they don’t think they can write better than the Ai can. I propose that student use of Ai comes from a lack of confidence and not a lack of work ethic.

So the question becomes, how do we get students to believe that they can outcompete AI, at least at some tasks? In The Paranoid Memorandum; A Generative AI Exercise for Professional Communication, Jason Crider offers an assignment that utilizes generative Ai to teach technical communications. During this assignment, Crider broke his students into four groups, tasked them with writing a memoranda and gave each group a card which read 

• “Create your document using only ChatGPT. You may style the document after the fact using what formatting, letterhead, embedded links you see fit, but you must only use text that was directly generated by ChatGPT.
• Draft your document using only ChatGPT. Once you find a structure or outline that you like, you may do line edits as you see fit.
• Draft your document without ChatGPT. Once you have a completed draft, use ChatGPT to edit, revise, or alter your draft in some way.
• Do not use ChatGPT at all.”

What separates this assignment from other assignments that get students working with Ai is what Crider called “The Trick”. Crider tricked his students by giving all of them a card which read “Do not use ChatGPT at all”. After each group wrote their memorandum they had a class discussion about the tone of each memorandum and the extent to which his students thought that ChatGPT had been used in each memorandum. Crider writes:

“We ended up having a long and nuanced discussion about how ChatGPT and other AI assistants now “haunt” the space of writing and how as writers we might think more strategically about how to use these tools, read with these tools in mind, and write in a way that still feels authentic even within a formulaic genre like a memorandum.”

Instead of trying to get students to use text generators as a tool to bolster their writing, assignments like Crider’s force students to recognize the ways in which they can beat the machine. Certainly, assignments which teach students how to use ChatGPT have their place in the contemporary classroom, but assignments like Crider’s teach students when ChatGPT may help their writing. More importantly, these types of assignments teach students that they can write better than the machine.

I think that assignments like Crider’s provide a vital first step towards teaching students to write with text generation. In addition, they provide an important preventative measure in the war against plagiarism. At the very least, if students can develop the confidence that they can outcompete the machine, they might steer clear of ChatGPT just to receive a higher grade on their papers. Fundamentally a human endeavor, humans will always have a competitive advantage over machines, at least in some aspects of writing.