November 30 marks the four-year anniversary of ChatGPT’s launch. In that time as a writing professor, I’ve seen much of the work I do change dramatically, and not for the better. The undergraduate courses I teach are riddled with AI writing, and I’m not alone.
The New York Times reported this summer that between two-thirds and 90 percent of high school and college students are using AI for schoolwork. A recently published study of 77 students by researchers at Virginia Tech found that only six students refrained from using AI to help them write, and nearly half of the students used AI and asked it to write their entire essays.
Individual teachers and institutions have come up with creative ways to overcome AI challenges by designing assessments that are inherently difficult for AI to ace, but collectively, the field of education, and higher education in particular, has not done enough to prevent AI misuse when it comes to writing. Instead, by and large, education has treated the problem of AI writing as an abstract and unconquerable evil, such as human suffering.
But the challenge of AI-generated writing in the classroom has always seemed like a fixable issue to me, if only there was a greater, widespread commitment to fighting it. Regardless of what you think of AI use overall, the idea that instructors should be able to ensure their students are actually writing what they say they are writing shouldn’t be controversial. Nor should we give up on trying to suppress the flood of AI writing.
Here are some steps institutions could take unilaterally or collectively to push back the ever-rising tide of AI.
1. Embrace AI Watermarks
AI watermarks act as a kind of digital fingerprint on AI work. The technology already exists to implement these, and it’s likely soon be required for most major AI platforms, particularly to comply with the European Union Artificial Intelligence Act, which requires watermarking.
Educators and education leaders should loudly applaud these efforts and be prepared for when watermarks are rolled out in the U.S. Consequently, schools and universities should issue clear guidance for students and teachers on how AI watermarking will be tested by educators as well as what the penalties and procedures will be once an AI watermark is detected in a student’s work.
2. Use Effective AI Detection Tools
AI detection tools emerged early as an obvious hedge against inappropriate AI use for writing. The problem is that many of these were initially terrible and resulted in false positives and nightmare accusations for students, which caused many in the field to immediately dismiss them. That was a mistake.
With the right procedures in place, AI detection tools can be utilized fairly. For example, Pangram has very high accuracy rates according to independent studies, and the company says its rate of falsely identifying a human-generated document as AI-generated is roughly 1 in 24,000. These numbers should continue to be assessed. If those rates hold up, there’s no reason this or other effective AI detection tools can’t be used by educators.
3. Put Collective Pressure on Tech Companies
AI technology is evolving and no response to it in the school setting is perfect . . . for the corporations creating the platforms! Not so much for students and educators.
So far, the vast majority of AI misuse in school involves only a few platforms. Still, these solution providers need to take more responsibility in addressing what they’ve done to traditional writing assignments in schools.
If a new smartphone was released that could hack into school data centers and change student grades, educators would be outraged and demand these tools be altered to protect student learning. And yet, this is essentially what is happening with AI writing.
As educators, we should demand tech companies lead the way in ensuring their products don’t obliterate academic integrity. I’m not naive enough to think these types of efforts would actually be effective, but there’s something to collectively and symbolically letting the tech world know that they are causing problems and that we can fix these problems with their help.
4. Greater Emphasis on Originality in Writing
If there’s one bright side to the surge in AI-generated generic writing, it’s that it has demonstrated just how vital creativity in writing is. We should have been fostering this more long before the AI revolution, but it’s become increasingly more critical now.
Writing assignments should not be used merely as ways for students to demonstrate their learning, but as opportunities for students to show their creativity, as well as take conversations and ideas further and in new directions than previously. We should start weighing originality and unique research and perspectives more strongly in our rubrics.
Additionally, we should be unabashed about giving lower marks for work that either was written by AI or sounds as though it could’ve been written by AI. This might be somewhat subjective, but no more so than many aspects of writing we grade, such as tone or strength of argument.
By centering creativity and originality in our approach to writing and grading, we’ll be establishing a foundation for human writing that can hopefully help stand up to the current generation of AI tools and subsequent iterations. I don’t think we’ll ever return entirely to the pre-ChatGPT days of student writing, but with some of the strategies discussed here, we can get a whole lot closer.
