AI software writing essays is a topic that has gained a lot of attention in recent years. With the advancements in artificial intelligence, it has become possible for students to create essays without actually writing them or learning.
Those opening sentences were written by a computer with just the prompt “ai software writing essays” from a human. Two more were generated as well, all for free, with just a free email account. The results prompt concerns from educators and parents preparing for the future as students take advantage of new and emerging technology.
Artificial intelligence programs have existed for years but with the systems being made free, open and accessible to anyone with an Internet connection, academic and other fields will need to adapt to keep up with what can be done without human input.
Anyone can search up a bevy of programs online and can generate content: cover letters, cookie recipes or news stories, from their laptop and while they might not always be perfectly accurate, occasionally spitting out a fake citation or wrong date, the body of the content is often enough to pass for human.
Local educators are trying to get ahead of the curve as these tools become more readily available.
“Our department has begun the task of forming a plan for the new AI technology … We discussed how some teachers have been open with students about the possibilities of using this new technology for learning rather than cheating. We also discussed that new technology includes apps that will check the level of AI in an essay in much the same way that we have checked papers for plagiarism,” El Campo High School English Instructional Coach B.J. Swenson said.
A major issue is that most of these programs will pass traditional plagiarism checking software because the content generated is completely new and based on a large body of other submitted written work for the software to learn from and emulate without copying whole sentences. Students can give the software a prompt, sometimes a length in words or paragraphs or a style, and short answers and essays can be generated.
Larger nearby districts are already taking note of what these technologies could mean for students.
“I asked (the software), ‘write an article about Tinker v. Des Moines paying special attention to the impact on individual liberty’. Ten seconds later I had a six-paragraph essay, with opening and concluding paragraphs that I would have graded as a solid B+. A student using this tool would have never needed to even glance at the case and turn in a passing assignment, and I, as a professor, would have no way of knowing,” Quintin Shepherd, Victoria ISD superintendent and law professor said in a Crossroads Today article.
How institutions approach writing assignments might have to change.
“Will teachers at high school and college levels require more in-class or on-paper work in the future? Probably/possibly. The answer is that we aren’t sure of the numerous implications that may result from this new challenge/opportunity,” Swenson said.
Working under the assumption that students submitting generated essays for their own work is cheating, El Campo ISD and Louise ISD both may reduce grades for those assignments. However, that isn’t necessarily clear yet.
“We do not have a plan yet (for how a student would be handled if they were caught),” Swenson said.
Texas Education Agency currently has no rules or guidance on how districts should handle students submitting generated work.
Other districts see these programs as an opportunity.
“I agree with Dr. Shepherd, this is a tool for giving feedback and providing exemplars for writing, but it does not take the place of learning to write. The objective of taking classes that teach writing is to learn to write,” Louise Superintendent Garth Oliver said. “It is not direct cheating or plagiarism but it is getting credit for something that you did not self generate, but neither is multiplying 8,298 by 27 on the calculator. So, this is difficult. At the end of the day, what skills do we want our students to learn?”
As of now, students haven’t been caught submitting generated work and El Campo ISD is still researching software to try and catch it.
