ChatGPT and Writing


Continuing this series of looking at how ChatGPT can be used effectively in language teaching and learning, I'm turning to writing. It's an obvious skill to focus on, given this is how ChatGPT expresses itself, in writing. 

It's not a surprise,then, that there are already guides available:

In 'A Teacher's Prompt Guide to ChatGPT' they only have the following suggestion when it comes to writing activities, which is similar to the activity I explored earlier this week: 

Ask ChatGPT to become an immersive Choose-Your-Own Adventure story. Input the prompt: “I'm trying to improve my understanding of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Develop a creative choose-your-own adventure story and keep asking me to choose an option before moving on to the next part of the story.” It will immerse you in a story while giving you choice. A potentially great prior knowledge or consolidation activity where students can share their different stories, decisions and outcomes they had in relation to the topic.

Highly recommended reading is the article Ediucational Research and AI-generated Writing: Confronting the Coming Tsunami. 

In this article, after usefully outlining how large language models like ChatGPT work, the authors present a summary on the kinds of tasks the tool can help with:

"...answering complex factual questions; writing an essay, story, play, or view of a teacher, professor or literary scholar; further revising the work based on that critique;  poem on almost any subject described3; writing a critique of that same text from the point ofwriting computer code based on natural language descriptions; summarizing or expanding on texts; and changing texts to reflect a different perspective or author (e.g., rewrite the Star-Spangled Banner as Bob Dylan might)."

After further discussing the capabilities of ChatGPT, rather than coming to any kind of conclusion about how it will affect writing in the future, the article concludes with a question (surprise! surprise!):

"Differences in modality matter and the process of writing is shaped in part by the available tools (Bazerman et al., 2018; Graham 2018; Wertsch 1991). How will AI-enabled tools change the process, and product, of writing? This is a pivotal moment in literacy. We must make the most of it."

One rapid development has been the number of tools that have recently emerged to help teachers detect if AI has been used. These include Turnitin, Plag.ai, Plagiarism Checker, Open AI Text Classifier, Originality.ai, Plagibot, and GPTZero.

Until then, if you want a thoughtful reflection on ChatGPT and how it compares to Google, then 'ChatGPT is a blurry JPEG of the Web' in the New Yorker, written by Sci-Fi author Ted Chiang, is a great read. 

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