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ChatGPT can't kill anything worth preserving

If an algorithm is the death of high school English, maybe that's an okay thing.

It is not entirely unlike the old saw about a million monkeys banging on a typewriter for along enough, that one of them would produce the works of Shakespeare through random chance, except this difference is, ChatGPT has been trained on a data set that eliminates all the gibberish. This process of “ungrading” or alternative grading has been gaining significant momentum in recent years, and I think it is a promising way of figuring out what is meaningful to students and what kinds of approaches help them learn. Towards the end of my novel, The Funny Man, my narrator says, “Everyone’s got a story, and the best ones are those we tell ourselves.” That was a little Easter Egg I put in the text before I had any notion that it would one day be published as a reminder of how interesting it was to solve the puzzle of writing a novel.

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