Automated Essay Writing: An AIED Opinion

Abstract

This opinion piece emerged from research for the book, Story Machines: How Computers Have Become Creative Writers, by Mike Sharples and Rafael Pérez y Pérez, published by Routledge. While thinking of ways to promote the book, I realised that students could employ AI story generators to write essays. That led me to research automated essay writing, write a Twitter thread that has garnered 43,000 engagements, and author a blog article (Sharples, 2022). The current piece is a revised and expanded version of that article.

ChatGPT: Bullshit spewer or the end of traditional assessments in higher education?

“…Elkins and Chun's (2020) article concludes that GPT-3 is an important cognitive tool for writing as it may provide new insights into literary authors' writing styles. There is other relevant academic literature (see Nguyen et al, 2022; Journal of Applied Learning & Teaching Vol.6 No.1 (2023) Sharples, 2022a;Sparrow, 2022).…”

ChatGPT for Education and Research: Opportunities, Threats, and Strategies

“…In mathematics and science education, calculators have become an inseparable part; similarly, ChatGPT will be an important tool for daily writing and work [41]. Sharples [42] proposed encouraging educators and learners to take advantage of the available capabilities of AI tools such as ChatGPT rather than forego their use. In this section, we present the prospects and opportunities of ChatGPT for education and research from the perspective of learners, educators, and researchers.…”

Cultivating writerly virtues: Critical human elements of multimodal writing in the age of artificial intelligence

“…These virtues can be learned, practiced, taught, and generated by people interacting with other people, but such writerly virtue cannot be performed by AI alone (at least, not at this time). In an example of a GPT-3-produced essay on learning styles, Sharples (2022) shows that the tool-generated text "falls apart" upon close inspection. These language models and tools, though they can be helpful for writers, cannot compose virtuously on their own because they "are essentially inexperienced, unthinking, and amoral, [with] no ability to reflect on what they have written, to judge whether it is accurate and decent" (Sharples, 2022(Sharples, , p. 1123.…”

“…In an example of a GPT-3-produced essay on learning styles, Sharples (2022) shows that the tool-generated text "falls apart" upon close inspection. These language models and tools, though they can be helpful for writers, cannot compose virtuously on their own because they "are essentially inexperienced, unthinking, and amoral, [with] no ability to reflect on what they have written, to judge whether it is accurate and decent" (Sharples, 2022(Sharples, , p. 1123. To determine how to compose a message that is accurate and decent, a person must practice virtue in determining how to communicate in and across contexts, with specific community(ies), and for certain purposes across their lifespan.…”