ChatGPT is getting a lot of attention, including a Chronicle article about the effect on student writing. (See a writing prompt I submitted and ChatGPT’s response—and why I’m not worried about business communication classes.)

The biggest worry about this AI tool is exactly what the developers promise:

We’ve trained a model called ChatGPT which interacts in a conversational way. The dialogue format makes it possible for ChatGPT to answer followup questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests. ChatGPT is a sibling model to InstructGPT, which is trained to follow an instruction in a prompt and provide a detailed response.

What’s to become of our assignments if students can simply paste in a prompt and get a computer-generated response? How will students learn to write? The Chronicle article challenges us to reevaluate our assignments: “Assignments and assessments are so formulaic that nobody could tell if a computer completed them.”

Ideas from the article to prevent cheating (which seems to be a primary concern) include showing students why writing is important and, “Flip your teaching so that seminal pieces of work are done in class. Focus more on multimedia assignments or oral presentations. Double down on feedback and revision. Ask students to write about topics of genuine interest to them, in which their voices come through and their opinions are valued.” The author cites problems with adjuncts and large class sizes and suggests that instructors need more time to create meaningful work for students.

I feel optimistic about our business writing courses. How well does AI write to a defined audience, with emotional nuance and appropriate jargon? We don’t teach five-paragraph essays. We teach audience analysis, critical thinking, data integrity, and emotional intelligence, and these topics need more attention. Maybe we use ChatGPT to start arguments, but students verify and build on them. Business communication faculty have always excelled at valuing our students, as a sociologist suggests:

The way forward is not to just lament supplanted skills, as Plato did, but also to recognize that as more complex skills become essential, our society must equitably educate people to develop them. And then it always goes back to the basics. Value people as people, not just as bundles of skills.

One tech writer believes ChatGPT “can be excessively verbose and overuse certain phrases.” That is certainly something our students can fix.

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