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I tried to replace myself with ChatGPT in my English class

My students call it “Chat,” a cute nickname they all seem to have agreed on at some point. They use it to make study guides, interpret essay prompts, and register for classes, turning it loose on t…

They didn’t like hearing how their AI-generated submissions, in which they’d clearly felt some personal stake, amounted to a big bowl of bland, flavorless word salad.This would seem to affirm the virtues of human-machine collaboration, except that the study’s authors noted another effect: the more “creative,” AI-assisted stories turned out very similar to one another. Far from being a comprehensive, value-neutral pool of all human writing, large language models like GPT have been trained on disproportionate quantities of Adventure, Fantasy, and Romance novels, as well as male-dominated internet spaces like Wikipedia and Reddit—the source, perhaps, of all those instances of “the real treasure was…,” which is of course a time-honored meme. “The air smelled clean,” he wrote, “like frozen earth and woodsmoke.” It was a glorious, chaotic opportunity to forget “about my Chem midterm, about how much I missed my dog back home, about how I still felt like an outsider in most conversations here”—until a snowball had smashed into his face, giving him a wicked bloody nose.

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