By Mirna Wabi-Sabi
ChatGPT is a subject that provokes much debate about the future of education in the world of writing. Artificial Intelligence which writes these texts, correct and well researched, is a threat only to educators and writers who expect good writing to be mechanical and inauthentic.
I rarely describe texts as “poorly” written, because often writing problems have more to do with failing to achieve a purpose than with the quality of word grouping. If your purpose as a writer is to reach a certain audience with a certain message, but your writing isn't meeting that goal, that's not bad writing, it's ineffective writing. On the other hand, a text full of grammatical “errors” can be extremely effective, therefore very well written.
Every person who writes has created texts that failed in their purpose. Nobody is born knowing how to write effectively, and the great challenge of writing work is to be willing to fine tune the message you want to convey to an audience and sharpen the tools you use to deliver that message.
ChatGPT is a robot. When a robot is authentic, using its writing as your own would be plagiarism. But this is not the reality we live in.
A text generated by Artificial Intelligence is nothing more than a text vending machine. And the nutritional value of what comes out of it is just that — something ultra-processed, industrialized, that comes out the same from all machines, it's effective in times of scarcity, but if you live on only that, you'll probably die early.
What are we doing, as writers and educators, to encourage authenticity? If authenticity does not exist in the classroom, the class is mediocre and encourages students to be mediocre. If a test is easily hacked by a robot, it is not effective, and anyone who passes it will not do an effective job.
Not to mention that there are already tools like GPTZero that aim to reveal whether a text was mostly written by Artificial Intelligence, just as there have been, for a long time, several tools that aim to detect plagiarism.
ChatGPT is not a threat, the threat is a long-standing educational system that fails year after year to train young people to produce truthful and impactful intellectual content.
If we are concerned about ChatGPT, in reality we should be panicking about how the education system encourages imitation and insincerity.