Education and Creation: The AI Crossroads
As a high school teacher, writer, and creator, I’ve had to navigate what this new AI world means in the realms I work. For teachers, ChatGPT was thrust upon us faster than we could even make time to understand it much less create professional development opportunities to collaborate and learn about it as a staff. In fact, it really wasn’t until our school wide anti-plagiarism platform, turnitin.com, notified users that it now has a tool that determines how much (if any) a student’s written work was created utilizing ChatGPT or other AI writing software. And as one might expect, while the detection tool isn’t perfect, frankly, it’s all we had. With every new piece of technology introduced, the education world always seems to be playing catch up, which is never a good place to be in academia.
I have to say the results of catching “bot narratives” was for me mixed. One student denied he used an AI for his paper and showed me his hand written draft, while another didn’t even complain when he earned a zero on his AI produced final draft. The change in tense, fluctuating pronouns, and generic information were all dead giveaways of a poorly written paper from an otherwise excellent student.
I happen to teach at an International Baccalaureate school, and as long as I can remember the organization has always had clear guiding principals on academic integrity. In fact, I have a poster of a more simplified version hanging in my classroom which I refer to when discussing student works and assessments. This visual reminder is probably forgotten, and it’s only until students get caught turning in compromised work do they recall the policy. Ah, youth.
You would think this would be the same for my creative writing class, which I taught for over ten years, and for the most part it is. For me, the concern isn’t so much the students will use AI to create short stories, poems, etc. (though this is clearly cause for concern for screenwriters — and rightfully so) but rather that they need to be honest with their audience. For many years, writers have utilized disclaimers when publishing their works. I teach my students how to include them in their self-published books, and we at Scattered Comics use them as well. It looks a little something like this:
“This is a work of fiction. Unless otherwise indicated, all the names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents in this book are either the product of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.”
As I was getting ready to publish my long awaited dystopian novella Blank Redux and launch the Kickstarter, it occurred to me that the artificial world that my evil corporation SynapCorp created in the book was in some ways mirroring ours — not just with drug induced pleasure seekers and artificial holographic fantasies, but with the words themselves. In this world, all journalistic outlets have been taken over by the corporation. News stories are now produced by the masses, and the stories that rate the highest by the public, get paid. My hero Echs, who is one of the last actual journalists in town, is covering a hit-and-run accident and as the public is either watching the scene or producing their own stories to publish, Echs manages to write a few details, merge his words with a “stolen” police report, and have AI do the rest. In seconds, the story is created and uploaded.
But that’s Echs’ world, right? Still, given the real teaching experience along with the fictional written one, I decided to add the following to my book disclaimer:
“This work is Organically Written. No AI was utilized in the crafting of the words, phrases, or descriptions of this narrative.”
This may seem a silly perhaps self-serving notification, but given the fiction I’m writing and the education reality I’m living, it seemed right. Time will tell, I suppose.
And one more avenue I had to consider is as a visual creator. I sketch and take pictures as my other artistic pursuits and found myself gravitating toward NightCafe to take my work to a different level. The artistic community I connect with has seen AI generated art as a mixed bag. Some use it, some reject it. For me, of all the works I’ve produce so far, about 20 percent are what I was envisioning. From there, I utilize Clip Studio Paint and Adobe Photoshop to complete the piece I’m working on. I’m sure I could dedicate a lot of time and text engaging others on whether these are “my” works or not. Suffice to say, history seems to point to somewhere in between.
Synthesizers, sampling music, editing photos, CGI — all technologies that at one time had their detractors (and some still do), but all are now utilized in creating new works. To what degree is up to the creator. What the audience wants or will accept — well, that’s always been a point of personal taste. AI is here to stay, but we need to see it for what it is: a tool. It isn’t a replacement for academia or art, and as with any tool, we should exercise caution and use it ethically.
