A minor sign of hope after the AI maelstrom

 AI, and the students' use of it to generate papers, consumed far too much of my brain earlier this semester. I'm teaching online, so my usual expedient of having them write in class isn't an option. 

It was wearing me out, between worrying that I was letting them get away with something and thus disadvantaging honest students or that I wasn't living up to the syllabus by checking everything. It was making me discouraged with teaching.

Turnitin wasn't helpful, nor was GPTZero, the supposedly good AI-catcher. The results could be wildly at odds with each other if you tried it twice in a row, unless something was coming up 100% AI generated. 

I called out a few students, per the syllabus. What that means: I had them talk to me. Many said it was Grammarly, which has gone heavily to AI, and said they wouldn't use it again. I am not anti-tech--eighteen years of blogging here should tell you that--but if they are not doing their own work, I can't help them make it better.

Then things started to get better. Aside from modifying the LMS discussion board settings and Perusall (no copy & paste, post your reply first before seeing others' responses--this I learned to restrict after a few students were copying from each other), I think what happened is this:

They realized that I was reading what they wrote. 

Now, I tell them this in the syllabus, but reading any syllabus, especially with all the required institutional boilerplate, is like reading the instructions for setting up a wireless router or, my favorite analogy, Beetlejuice's Guide for the Recently Deceased. 

Was it just adjusting the rubrics that made the difference? Maybe some. I discovered that having good criteria there would take care of the few AI-written posts, which naturally fell down to the C- or D level.

But I like to believe that it was that there was a real person in there, in those discussion boards, commenting and upvoting and mentioning by name the students and the specific things that they did well. They know that there is a person behind the class.

And on their papers, addressing the specifics of what they had written, suggesting other ways to develop the argument, and so on.

And in answering their emails quickly and with a sense of their real concerns. 

What I noticed is that the AI boilerplate--so far, anyway--seems to have died down, and I've mostly stopped looking for it and thinking about it.

This may, of course, just be an artifact of its being five weeks from the end of the semester, or maybe I'm missing something.

But their writing seems to be more authentic, more as it used to be, and not that MEGO AI boilerplate. 

With some of the professional organizations in the field throwing in the towel and writing guidelines not about if we will use AI but how extensively we ought to use it, I count my students' responses as a sign of hope. 

Maybe if we give them authentic feedback, as the MLA-CCCC report suggests, they will respond with authentic writing. 

What authors (and characters) could learn from When Harry Met Sally

 I’m working on an author now who made choices in her life—and whose characters make choices—that make you want to yell “don’t do it!” This isn’t anything I have a right to have an opinion on, of course: a dramatic life, and characters who make choices that seem irrational to me, are the stuff of literature. 

But I keep wishing that the author, and her characters, had the benefit of watching at least two scenes in When Harry Met Sally.

These aren’t the main scenes, but they seem to echo from classic fiction all the way down to today. 

1. This is actually a series of scenes. Throughout the first half of the movie, Carrie Fisher’s character, Marie, is having an affair with a married man. (I can’t remember their character names and so will refer to them by the actors’ names.) 

She keeps bringing up evidence that he’s going to leave his wife for her. I’m paraphrasing, but the dialogue goes like this:

Carrie Fisher: “I was going through the receipts, and he just bought her a $300 nightgown. I don’t think he’s ever going to leave his wife.”

Meg Ryan: “No one thinks he is ever going to leave his wife.” 

Carrie Fisher: “You’re right, you’re right, I know you’re right.” 

The scene is repeated, with comic variations, until the double date when she meets Bruno Kirby. Spoiler: the married man never leaves his wife for Carrie Fisher.

2. The second scene occurs when Meg Ryan tells Billy Crystal that she and Jack Ford don’t believe in marriage, that marriage isn’t modern, that Jack is holding off proposing to her because he doesn’t—they don’t, she hastily amends— believe in marriage. 

Later, to no one’s astonishment, he breaks up with her and is married almost immediately. As she tells Billy Crystal, weeping, when he comes to her apartment to comfort her:

“He said he never wanted to get married. What he really meant is that he didn’t want to marry me.”

Now, not everyone wants to get married, and that’s fine, equality, feminism, etc.etc. It’s not always a good choice, but it is a choice that people get to make. 

But as evidenced by a thousand advice columns featuring women who do want to get married, who hang in there for years and years to men who are just this close to proposing, they’re sure, if she’s just patient enough and gives up her dream of having children because he doesn’t like them or whatever—and to the aftermath, which is that they break up and he’s married to someone else with a child on the way in a year or two—Nora Ephron’s home truth—that “he didn’t want to marry me”—is something that the characters in this novel, and the author herself, could stand to learn. If men want to get married, they will find a way. If they don’t, they won’t. 

Patience may work for 19th-century heroines like Jane Eyre, but in the modern era—well, these characters should just watch When Harry Met Sally.