At the tail end of last November, the research and development company OpenAI released a chatbot called ChatGPT. In under a week, more than a million users were testing the limits of the program. It writes essays, songs and jokes on demand. It can suggest recipes for the ingredients in your refrigerator and write an apology letter to your spouse.
A priest friend had it write the better part of his Christmas homily as a point about living a life of Christ rather than just talking like someone who does. The program answered the challenge to draft a modern-day script adaptation of Chaucer’s “The Miller’s Tale.” It quickly composed a poem that, at my request, compared teenage angst to a cucumber:
It fears being picked, sliced, and diced
Left in the salad, a mere compromise
I first discovered the chatbot in an essay by Daniel Herman in The Atlantic that declared it to be “the end of high school English.” Over the next several weeks, the reactions from educators and others ranged from fear to dismissiveness to enthusiastic embrace of the new technology.
We should have seen this coming. Artificial Intelligence — driven by algorithms rather than synapses — continues to grow in sophistication. Several months ago, a Google engineer named Blake Lemoine went public with his conviction that the Google chatbot LaMDA had become sentient. Cicero, a bot developed by Meta, proved superior to most human opponents in Diplomacy, a game based on conversational negotiation and persuasion skills.
English class will need to change, for sure. In the English class that survives the rise of the robots, the composition takes place within the class with the teacher-as-mentor crouched next to emerging writers. Good teachers will figure out powerful ways to use new tools. And if not, ChatGPT has plenty of suggestions:
Such uses of the chatbot reflect best practices a writing coach would have employed anyway, freeing that English teacher up for one-on-one interaction and reducing the risk of burnout from family evenings hijacked by stacks of personal narratives and essays on Julius Caesar. ChatGPT is a bit error-prone now, but through user feedback it is continuing to grow in integrity and reliability.
In the long run, the death of high school English might be the least of our concerns.
Technology has been replacing humans for generations, especially within the blue-collar fields. Despite fears of automation, we’ve mostly seen augmentation: outdated jobs disappearing and new ones emerging in response to technological advancement.
But AI is something different than a robot on an assembly line. It presents a threat to the artists and the writers, the actuaries and the architects. It is, someday just down the road, an online teacher with the superpower to evaluate thousands of papers while instructing thousands of kids. And all without one cup of coffee.
We want to fulfill something in who we are during our journey from birth to death. Self-actualization is the highest need in Maslov’s taxonomy. What would become of humanity if we are similarly stripped of our sense of agency by machines who call dibs on our passions?
Karl Marx imagined a society where automation would become so advanced that we would exist in a post-work utopia, a more equal and just society. On the other hand, German Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper predicted an existential mess among people living in a workless world, unless they could find some sense of purpose. For Pieper (and those of us in Catholic education), this comes through a relationship with God.
It is in imagining such a future that one sees why now, more than ever, our young people need English class. If writing is simply about our interoffice memos, our college term papers and our professional reports, then we’re in big trouble, and so is high school English. AI will learn to do all of these things for us —and better than we do them. If such functional writing is all English classes are good for, then it’s time to ask ChatGPT to write a eulogy for the class. (And, yes, I tried it. Have tissues handy if you do the same.) Writing trains the brain to engage in meaningful conversations about complex topics.
It is the type of introspection that builds emotional intelligence and connects young people with the humanity that their social media erodes. Turning our thoughts into ink is a more deliberate contemplation, downshifting our brains into a slower but more powerful gear. Writing is therapy. Writing is prayer. Writing is, as ChatGPT expressed it, “a glimpse into the soul.”
Not only do we need English class, but composition needs to increase across the curriculum, especially in our theology classes, so that, through our pens and keyboards, we can explore that greater purpose Pieper imagined.
When drafting this essay, I asked ChatGPT how it has grown through the writing it has done. I do not have the ability to think or feel in the same way that a human would, the chatbot responded, and I do not have personal experiences or emotions that I can draw on in my responses.
Writing teaches us to organize and evaluate our take on the world, seeing it again (re-vision) and becoming slightly different individuals on the other side of a journal entry or a reflective essay.
My purpose, the machine continued, is to assist users by providing them with information and generating text based on their requests.
Writing is when, as Hemingway is to have said, we “sit down in front of a typewriter and bleed.” It is a bloodletting for the soul. English classes aren’t dead because, done right, they were never really about the semicolons or the formatting.
I am not a writer in the traditional sense, ChatGPT wrote in conclusion to its answer. I do not have the ability to grow or develop as a result of my interactions with users.
Nor will students grow or develop through AI-generated compositions.
So chatbots have become essay vending machines?
That’s fine. English classes have better things to do.
Spencer Allen is the principal at Helias Catholic High School, Diocese of Jefferson City.
Spencer Allensallen@heliascatholic.com