If You Write For Real, Chat GPT Cannot Replace You

The college essay may be over, but writing itself is not

It’s rare when an article goes viral these days, so James D. Walsh’s “Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College” post must have really tapped into something. To be a bit more specific, the article tapped into multiple things, as tends to happen with a hit.

People worry about AI replacing them. People worry that the incoming generation is ignorant and lazy. People worry that college is one big scam. People worry that nobody reads. People worry about a situation where only cheaters prosper. People worry that there’s no way to differentiate between robot and human. People worry.

I credit HoS friends Sharp Tech for trenchant thoughts on the article. My biggest takeaway from their segment was Ben Thompson’s quote:

Things like this are less causal than revelatory.

As in, yes, there’s a major component of LLMs changing life as we know it, but also, in this case, technology is exposing a system that’s more about producing credentials and sinecures than advancing human knowledge.

There are ways to force young adults into proving they know information. The death of the take home test or essay shouldn’t be an existential crisis for the entire university system. It just so happens that said system is so rotted that it can hardly handle this information democratization. Many classes and majors were trundling along without asking much of or giving much to the students. Now that the students can easily “cheat,” it reveals that they’re not cheating themselves out of a lot by letting a machine go through the motions.

I’ve long been confused as to why writing has long been such a lynchpin of the college testing system. Perhaps that’s a contrarian take for someone who writes for a living. Obviously I believe in the value of organizing and conveying thoughts. I just never believed in the essay as a great revealer of knowledge. Back in high school, I was tested with Scantron bubbles and so I tried hard. If I didn’t know the answer, I couldn’t fill in the right bubble.

In college, it was assumed that such a rudimentary system couldn’t possibly capture “critical thinking” at this high level. At least that’s the answer I got when asking why 90 percent of my tests and assignments were now in essay format. Ironically, I hated all the written assignments. In theory, as one of the few people on earth who enjoy writing, I was built to easily deal with the work. In reality, I disliked the uncanny valley of essay-as-test. Was the prose supposed to be artistic? Or was it just a flabby way to do the rote regurgitation that was better left to the Scantron? Writing-as-test felt about as seamless to me as dancing about architecture.

Eventually, I reasoned that the garbled mechanism allowed me to be lazier. Hit the bullet points, forget about structure. It’s not a shock to me that students are cheating with GPT now because back then, we were all trying to game the system in our own legal way. When cramming at the dorm, we were approaching this more like a bank heist than pure pursuit. “What do they want us to say? How do we say it?” We had zero faith that simply reading the material in a committed manner would yield the desired results. And we only cared about those results. Process, not so much.

I had a friend on my floor named Erica Johnson and she was the smartest person I’d ever met. She went on to be a founder, and apparently had some sort of high profile split with her co-founder. I’ve zero thoughts or insight into that story, but can attest that Erica was an impressive and highly conscientious person in college. We used her notes, her flash cards, her eerily perfect systematized presentation of knowledge that otherwise appeared all a mess. I’d never encountered an individual so capable of digesting and reproducing information in such a clean manner. Erica was our GPT, a super computer who allowed mortals to briefly feign expertise.

I’m not saying Erica got me through college because she was only in a few of my classes. I’m just reminded of the people on my floor, night before the test, gathering around this oracle that God had sent to solve our problems. It wasn’t necessarily fair back then that we could briefly fake being her. It’s certainly not fair now if the modern Erica Johnson has little performance edge over fellow students who can consult GPT.

I’m not going to solve those issues here, though. I’m more looking back and laughing at how everything we took from Erica was to then be recapitulated into an essay format. It was such a perfect set up for laundering that it didn’t even occur to me that I was laundering. One difference between back then and today is that students now don’t even have to plug in the unearned bits of knowledge, or implement the structure around where those pieces go. It’s all made to order.

This means that there’s a lot less writing and a lot more “writing.” From the viral article:

After spending the better part of the past two years grading AI-generated papers, Troy Jollimore, a poet, philosopher, and Cal State Chico ethics professor, has concerns. “Massive numbers of students are going to emerge from university with degrees, and into the workforce, who are essentially illiterate,” he said. “Both in the literal sense and in the sense of being historically illiterate and having no knowledge of their own culture, much less anyone else’s.” That future may arrive sooner than expected when you consider what a short window college really is.

I’ve seen signs of this in younger generations and wouldn’t reflexively dismiss the problem. I’m less focused on “historically illiterate” for reasons I’ve detailed. I choose to be an optimist about the capacity of emergent technology to inform the masses on historical matters. I’m less optimistic about writing skill being lindy. It appears that the ability to write is getting outcompeted by the ease with which one can delegate “writing.”

If we establish that writing might be a dying art, then is writing over? Is conveying thoughts, even in podcast form, doomed? Like everyone else, I’m concerned about being replaced. I can certainly be outcompeted by different forms of entertainment, but the more pressing question to me is whether the machine can replace a writer as a writer. And I guess you be the judge, because this entire article was generated by three prompts to Chat GPT.

Just kidding, and I think you know I’m kidding. We’re not there yet. We are when it comes to a competent interpretation of what Plato’s cave means metaphorically, but not when it comes to whatever this is.

Some of my science-minded friends will smirk and say that, yes, the AI will replace the artist too in due time. Maybe. But for now, you’re likely here to hear thoughts from a human. That it comes from a human is a currency, as drably inhuman as calling it “currency” sounds. When I want to hold my wife’s hand, I want it to be her hand. Yes, it would be impressive if you created a machine that felt exactly the same, but that actually sounds vaguely terrifying. No thanks.

This post was imperfect and some would even call it meandering. Did it have a strong thesis? Was the thesis even established at the start? I’m sure I’ll learn about the typos 15 minutes after it posts.

But you’re in it for the choices. Even if it was a detour, you’re in it for Erica Johnson, a 2005 memory about a person that the machine could not have anticipated.

When the Celtics lose, I want to hear from Bill Simmons, just to see how Bill Simmons specifically reacts. I don’t care if a machine might give me a more objective and comprehensive take on Jayson Tatum. I want the biased human version, informed by years of memories. I don’t believe that this impulse to absorb thoughts from people is going away any time soon. It’s just too elemental to who we are to be replaced by whom we consult.