randcraw 5 days ago

A good start for this debate would be to reconsider the term "AI", perhaps choosing a term that's more intuitive, like "automation" or "robot assistant". It's obvious that learning to automate a task is no way to learn how to do it yourself. Nor is asking a robot to do it for you.

Students need to understand that learning to write requires the mastery of multiple distinct cognitive and organizational skills, only the last of which is to generate text that doesn't sound stupid.

Each of writing's component tasks must be understood and explicitly addressed by the student, to wit: (1) choosing a topic to argue, and the component points to make a narrative, (2) outlining the research questions needed to answer each point, and finally, (3) choosing ONLY the relevant points that are necessary AND sufficient to the argument AND based on referenced facts, and that ONLY THEN can be threaded into a coherent logical narrative exposition that makes the intended argument and that leads to the desired conclusion.

Only then has the student actually mastered the craft of writing an essay. If they are not held responsible for implementing each and every one of these steps in the final product, they have NOT learned how to write. Their robot did. That essay is a FAIL because the robot has earned the grade; not they. They just came along for the ride, like ballast in a sailing ship.

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BlueTemplar 1 day ago

The word is "machine".

Quite relevant here (maybe not where Universities are directly concerned) is the history of Luddites breaking automated textile equipment to protest their high skilled jobs disappearing in favour of much less skilled jobs of machine operators.