Can ChatGPT make human writing more efficient, or is writing an inherently time-consuming process best handled without AI tools?
This article was found in EdSurge written by Jeffrey R. Young May 23, 2024
When ChatGPT emerged a year and half ago, many professors immediately worried that their students would use it as a substitute for doing their own written assignments — that they’d click a button on a chatbot instead of doing the thinking involved in responding to an essay prompt themselves.
But two English professors at Carnegie Mellon University had a different first reaction: They saw in this new technology a way to show students how to improve their writing skills. To be clear, these professors — Suguru Ishizaki and David Kaufer — did also worry that generative AI tools could easily be abused by students. And it’s still a concern.
Some points from the article
AI in Education: The article discusses how professors at Carnegie Mellon University are exploring “restrained AI” to enhance teaching writing skills.
This article discusses an approach called “restrained generative AI,” piloted by two English professors at Carnegie Mellon University. This approach uses AI language models like ChatGPT to assist students with writing assignments rather than having them rely entirely on AI to generate essays.
Their approach involves building software tools that let students input notes, outlines, or bullet points, and then they use AI to expand those into draft sentences and paragraphs while placing constraints to prevent the AI from introducing entirely new content or hallucinations.
The professors argue that this can help reduce students’ cognitive load by allowing them to formulate complete sentences while still developing their ideas and arguments. However, some writing experts caution that automating this translation from notes to prose may short-circuit an important part of the writing process.
Stacie Rohrbach, an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon, sees potential in tools like the myScribe software developed by her colleagues. She notes that instructors have long encouraged students to create robust outlines before writing, stating, “We’ve long encouraged students to always do a robust outline and say, ‘What are you trying to say in each sentence?'” She hopes that “restrained AI” approaches could help facilitate that outlining process. However, Rohrbach also says that students misused ChatGPT to generate gibberish text where “The ideas get lost. The sentences are framed correctly, but it ends up being gibberish.”
An author and education consultant, John Warner expressed skepticism about whether the myScribe tool can prevent AI “hallucinations” where erroneous information gets inserted. He says experts he has spoken to don’t think fully preventing hallucinations is possible, as “Hallucination is a feature of how large language models work. The large language model is absent in judgment. You may be unable to escape the language model making something up. Because what does it know?”
More broadly, Warner argues that automating the translation from notes to prose text may not be beneficial, stating, “A lot of these tools want to make a process efficient that has no need to be efficient. A huge thing happens when I go from my notes to a draft. It’s not just a translation.” He believes translating one’s own notes into sentences is an important part of the writing process that shouldn’t be short-circuited.
The article explores the potential benefits of using AI writing aids in this restrained way to augment student writing skills and the challenges of preventing AI hallucinations when transforming notes to text. Overall, it presents the approach as one vision for responsibly incorporating generative AI into teaching writing amid concerns about student misuse.
myScribe video demo
Our goal is to work toward a responsible future that embraces AI in writing without dehumanizing it. Suguru Ishizaki and David Kaufer
Welcome to the demonstration of myScribe. myScribe enables writers to turn a blank page into a complete draft with AI and interactive visualization. It quickly translates bulleted lists of ideas into prose with its notes-to-prose feature, while ensuring that writers are in charge of the content. Its assessment features allow writers to assess the effectiveness of their writing, helping them refine their text and turn it into a final draft. Suguru Ishizaki.