Peter Green (not the deceased Fleetwood Mac founder but a writer for Forbes) took issue with the doomsday predictions about Open AI’s new ChatbotGPT, an algorithmic software program that does a remarkable job of “writing” articles that, in many cases, look as if they were composed by a human being. So did John Warner in his Substack column, “ChatGPT Can’t Kill Anything Worth Preserving,” and Lincoln Michel in “The Only Sure Thing With AI Is Writing Will Get Blander And The Rich Will Get Richer.”
Let’s start with Green, who writes, “In one week, the Atlantic has declared both the death of the college essay and the end of high school English.” A 39-year English teacher, Green acknowledges, “The college essay may well be dead; that’s not a bad thing … [but] English class … is not dead….” Like the others cited above, Green does not think the five-paragraph essay used in standardized tests had any value even before ChatbotGPT showed how easy it is to execute a formulaic task like that. As for English class, if a teacher is asking a student to write something that a “bot” can write, that teacher needs to rethink the assignment.
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