David Hutt
Talk to a university professor these days, and it isn’t long before they’re complaining that almost every student is now using ChatGPT to write essays. My response is always the same: maybe the problem is that essays have taken over the way universities judge a student’s aptitude. What about scrapping essays and going back to hand-written or oral exams? Attempting this response recently, a professor friend agreed with me but opposed the solution in principle because “it would mean I have to spend more time with students.”
In the 1930s, the economist Paul Anthony Samuelson coined the term “revealed preference” to explain how consumer behavior could be discovered by simply observing what people bought, not just by asking them what they wanted or by making assumptions. Likewise, as all psychologists know, allowing someone to vent their grievances usually uncovers a “revealed problem,” usually a psychological plight that is causing the physical behavior. Alcoholism or drug addiction, for instance, are often manifestations of depression or social isolation, rather than being the root problem.
On the whole, I’m rather pro-ChatGPT, in part because I’ve come to think of it as the great revealer of problems. As with my professor friend, the problem isn’t that students are using ChatGPT to write essays; it’s that professors don’t want to spend even more time with students that alternative examinations would require. To be fair to most academics, this is because universities now require them to spend almost all their hours researching and publishing, since the number of publications a faculty produces has become the sole metric by which their competence is measured.
Likewise, is it a problem that ChatGPT can write legal copy better than most trainee lawyers? Or is the problem that law firms have, for too long, demanded interns and trainees do endless drudge work because of the legal profession’s money-grabbing obsession with “billable hours,” which has convinced clients that time spent equals value delivered, thus allowing a firm’s partners to earn millions of dollars from slothfulness? One might also ask whether ChatGPT’s ability to write turgid journalistic copy is an existential crisis to my own industry, or whether it reveals the actual problem: so much of journalism has become writing clickbait bumf that requires no actual investigation or original thinking and can easily be done by an LLM that’s far better at searching on Facebook for the latest consumer craze or exaggerated outrage?
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