There has been talk of using Bard or some other internet-base artificial intelligence to “help students” write papers. As a college composition instructor, I foresee this becoming an issue in class. I am all in favor of using electronic resources to find information for students, but I don’t want to shortcut the thinking process.

The last class I taught was Race and Ethnic Studies. The purpose of the course is for students to consider a variety of experiences and think about how they will interact with different groups within society when they are out in the public as nurses, entrepreneurs, social workers and law enforcement. The purpose of me assigning papers is for them to consider the different texts they’ve read then summarize, analyze, synthesize and communicate the information for themselves.

These are skills that need to be practiced and having a search-bot scrape the interwebs for content then vomit out grammatically correct mashups is not helpful. There are plenty of amazing essays floating around about intercultural relations, but I want the students to wrestle with these ideas themselves. I want them to think and feel and sit with something for a while.

It’s not even about cheating. I’ve had the odd student cut and paste from Wikipedia, so it isn’t about catching them. It’s about the student growing as a person. What is the point of walking a mile in another man’s shoes if you’re just going to call an Uber? Ultimately, a student’s experience in college will be up to them and how much they want to learn and grow. As a society we have an opportunity to be better, the question is, will we take it?