My attention was drawn immediately to our readings on ChatGPT for a number of reasons. In addition to academic librarianship, my background is also in classroom teaching, and I’m interested in ChatGPT for the role it will play in library instruction of the future. I’ve taught at the adult level, but more recently I was a high school English teacher at an academy where “ChatGPT” was a bad word. And not without good reason. Teachers, myself included, were floundering to protect the academic integrity of our students, while also instilling a sense of responsibility and pride in their own original work– As Moriarty puts it, “Writing makes you smarter. Writing makes you unique. ChatGPT makes you sound like everybody else. Which, I guess, makes you forgettable” (2023).
A fellow teacher sheepishly suggested that perhaps we could learn more about ChatGPT and its possible uses in a way that might actually help rather than hurt the classroom, but the idea was never taken seriously. So much fear-mongering exists within education when it comes to new technology, but this was my first time experiencing it on the teaching end. Moriarty writes that “cheating” or the compromise of academic integrity will quickly be addressed by ChatGPT detectors, and that “students asking ChatGPT to do their homework for them” will quickly become a moot point. As an academic librarian whose instruction often revolves around plagiarism, I do sincerely hope that will be true. But for the duration of my employment at the academy, it wasn’t. Many kids slipped through the cracks, and without administrative support, teachers were at a loss.
Still, I love Moriarty’s optimism for the future. I loved his idea about using ChatGPT as a brainstorming tool, offering suggestions and writing prompts to spark a student’s original thoughts. I am thinking about the potential uses of ChatGPT for research in the library. I also loved Fisher and Head’s comparison of ChatGPT to the early days of Wikipedia, noting that Wikipedia is now recognized as an appropriate “tertiary source”– sounds a lot like Moriarty’s idea (2023).
Others, like Tufekci, see ChatGPT as an opportunity to expand the flipped classroom:
“In flipped classrooms, students wouldn’t use ChatGPT to conjure up a whole essay. Instead, they’d use it as a tool to generate critically examined building blocks of essays. It would be similar to how students in advanced math classes are allowed to use calculators to solve complex equations without replicating tedious, previously mastered steps” (2022).
I am imagining how this could also be true in a research setting, specifically in aiding students with the creation of their research question, queries, theses, as more. In the library, I see huge potential for ChatGPT (and future tools that like it) to help shape the general direction of research rather than becoming the enemy of research altogether. Overall, this was a fascinating and eye opening module and topic for me.
Edit:
Lastly, I want to include something else that stood out to me in this module (that I will take with me into future academic library settings). The way the NMC Horizon Report reframes challenges impeding technology adoption in academic and research libraries is incredibly helpful and sheds light on the “problem” of ChatGPT in the classroom. In my limited experience, I would say this issue falls somewhere between solvable and difficult. To borrow language from the chart within our module, this is a challenge which we understand and adopting this technology would improve digital literacy, however solutions do seem elusive on a larger scale. Educators are much more focused on the banning of this technology in order to cling to the status quo. Meanwhile, a paradigm shift towards inclusion could result in successful adoption and implementation of ChatGPT as a powerful learning tool in the classroom.
References
Fister, J. & Head, B. (2023, May 4). ChatGPT is reshaping information infrastructures (opinion). Inside Higher Ed | Higher Education News, Events and Jobs. https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/views/2023/05/04/getting-grip-chatgpt
Halprin Jackson, J., & Moriarty, T. (2023, May 4). Chatting with ChatGPT: Deep Dive in Five with Tom Moriarty | SJSU NewsCenter. https://blogs.sjsu.edu/newsroom/2023/chatting-with-chat-gpt-deep-dive-in-five-with-tom-moriarty/
Tufekci, Z. (2026, December 15). What would Plato say about ChatGPT? New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/15/opinion/chatgpt-education-ai-technology.html
Thanks for this very measured take on a topic that provokes a lot of kneejerk reactions, in both directions. I tend to fall on the side of it being largely a negative tool for the humanities. Something that will reorient the ways we discuss and teach critical thinking.
Right now, there is a huge, overwhelming push away from the humanities as being an entirely impractical field. STEM rules the land. This is reflected in the quote above, where ChatGPT is framed a kind of calculator and the process of thinking through an idea as being tedious, already mastered steps. This is, of course, true in math, where equations must follow specific set patterns and rules. But if you’re writing an essay or working out a research question, it’s the personal struggle that gives the work its real value. The human element is what gives it its value. If you teach people to skip this difficult work, and to rely on what are essentially borrowed ideas coldly cobbled together from variety of unknown sources, you run the risk of seriously stunting their ability to develop any genuinely new or exciting ideas.
Hi @louis, thanks for your comment. I am right there with you. I have seen that same argument comparing ChatGPT to calculators, and the problem for me is that it’s not being used that way. I like the general idea behind Moriarty telling students “writing makes you smarter. ChatGPT makes you sound like everybody else.” That’s a great argument… but it’s falling on deaf ears. My students did not care about developing skills. They care about getting the assignment over with. And that’s not a dig at the students. In my personal experience, young students often must be taught to care, and the process of writing is one way to teach them that. In cases like that, ChatGPT builds a bridge from the start of the learning process to the end of it, allowing students to completely skip the actual learning.
Going back to the calculator example, we as educators allow students to use calculators in upper level coursework only, such as calculus and trig. I don’t know what constitutes that upper level coursework within the humanities– I don’t know who those students might be. But I know who they aren’t: highschoolers who are just getting the hang of writing.
@bklint I was actually wondering about this recently – how professors actually detect if a student used an AI tool or not. There are several students at the university I work at who have openly admitted to me that they use ChatGPT to write papers or to summarize projects all the time, and they never get caught. Regardless, when students do this they are only cheating themselves and will have a hard time in their careers trying to come up with original thoughts or ideas.
@inabookbind I totally agree. I think it’s a disservice to our own brains to bypass the writing process. Also, it places a huge burden on our already burnt out community of teachers to detect plagiarism in a new way. It’s a really hard topic.
@bklint I really like your take on this, and I agree with what Louis said about it provoking knee-jerk responses. I’d not heard that Moriarty quote before but I think it’s so true! AI works with existing data, whereas human minds–while admittedly drawing inspiration from past writers’ ideas, style, etc–can employ imagination in a singular way. Frequently on my mind is a Reddit quote I saw about someone doubting the existence of human souls until they saw AI-generated art.
Also, like you and the others have mentioned, I do think that students who skip the learning process/engaging with material are robbing themselves of education. I mentioned in one of my posts that a family friend’s classmate “wrote” her college essays using generative AI, which I think will set her up for difficulty unless she plans to keep submitting AI essays and can get away with it. That said, there definitely are ways it can be used to supplement education, such as help in brainstorming research topics or expediting the process of creating Open Education Resources (which can consume too much staff time to be feasible, but which also eliminate financial barriers to study). Such materials would need a THOROUGH review by faculty, but I do think there’s merit there.
Anyway, great post! I love thinking about this topic and hadn’t really done so prior to this course.