Instructions: You will be able to read the essay prompt once you begin the quiz. Write a 500-word essay answering the prompt. You may use a dictionary and refer to the reading assignments as you are working, but do not use any other materials, and do not accept help from anyone else during the essay. Once you begin the quiz, you will have 3 hours (180 minutes) to complete your essay. After 180 minutes, the essay will be automatically submitted. You will have only one attempt, so please be very careful not to submit the essay until you are finished. Before taking the essay, you will need to have the Chrome browser installed with the HonorLock Chrome extension. If you do not already have Chrome on your computer (or the computer that you will use to take the essay), you may download Chrome for free here. Once you have Chrome installed, please go here to add the HonorLock extension. You will not be able to take the essay unless you are using Chrome with HonorLock. More information is given below on the HonorLock settings. Please read this carefully before you begin the essay. HonorLock HonorLock will be used on this essay to prevent academic dishonesty. Your computer screen will be recorded during the essay, and all web pages outside of Canvas will be blocked. HonorLock will not record your webcam or microphone. Authorized Materials and Academic Honesty During the essay, you may use a dictionary, and you may use any of the reading assignments from class. All reading assignments are shown below. If you include any words or ideas from the reading assignments in your essay, be sure to cite the author. Example: "According to Fujimoto, "I have never been perfect, nor can I ever write anything perfect. But I can always be authentic." You are not required to include a Works Cited page at the end of your essay, but if you would like to, you may copy the citations that are given at the end of the texts. Aside from the reading assignments and a dictionary, no other materials or tools are allowed during the essay. Do not use any web pages, articles, AI, translators, or grammar checkers to help you. Using any unauthorized materials is a violation of academic honesty, and will result in a zero on the essay. Do not ask anyone else for help during the essay, and do not offer help to anyone else on the essay. You may email me at agipp@glendale.edu if you have any questions about the essay instructions or expectations, and I will reply as quickly as possible. "I Improved My Writing With Grammarly, and So Can You" by Jill Duffy The first time I tried the online writing tool Grammarly, I admit that I was mostly interested in uncovering its faults. I was caught off guard by what the app did well, though unsurprised (and hopefully not too smug) about where it came up short. That was in 2016. Grammarly has grown and improved since then, with new features that let you choose what kind of document you're writing and what type of audience will read it. Grammarly is a writing app that benefits all kinds of writers, from non-native speakers to busy professionals. It helps you nip typos, errors, and poor word choices in the bud. Even experienced writers may find that sending their copy for a quick spin through Grammarly forces them to at least reconsider a few words and phrases they may have overlooked. What Is Grammarly? Grammarly analyzes writing and suggests improvements. Despite its name, Grammarly is much more than just a grammar checker. It looks for repetitive words, jargon, homonyms, and hackneyed phrases, as well as words that non-native speakers commonly misuse. Even if you reject its suggestions, Grammarly forces you to pause and reconsider your word choices There are two options for using Grammarly. The easiest way, although not the way I prefer, is to install an extension in Google Chrome and other apps so that Grammarly checks your work as you type. I don't like this option because the immediate feedback is distracting; plus I have privacy concerns about letting a plug-in read everything I write all the time. The second option—and this is the method I use—is to write your document in whatever writing app or word processor you typically use, and then paste your text into the Grammarly app. You can choose between a web app and a desktop app. This method works well for documents, but it's not as convenient for emails and other daily business communication where copying and pasting between programs would cost you time. Take Grammarly for a Test Drive When it's at its best, Grammarly identifies vague words such as "great," and suggests you swap them for more descriptive ones. It finds typos and offers corrections, which you can accept in one click. It underlines words you use with high frequency and recommends synonyms. Even if you reject its suggestions, Grammarly forces you to pause and reconsider your word choices, which is beneficial in itself. When Grammarly is at its worst, it suggests words that change the meaning of your sentences or deplete the effectiveness of reusing a word or phrase intentionally. My biggest disappointment came when Grammarly couldn't suss out the fact that "however" has more than one meaning, and it suggested I make a change that would have introduced an error. It can also be as fussy as an eighth-grader in an advanced composition course about comma usage. If only someone would tell Grammarly that most commas are discretionary. Was I getting too cocky about my writing? Should I have been accepting more of Grammarly's suggestions? Second-guessing myself wasn't making anything better. Analysis of Professional, Polished Writing Out of curiosity and to give myself a sanity check, I copied and pasted into Grammarly a creative nonfiction essay published in The Paris Review. At the time of its publication, this piece had garnered all kinds of attention and praise. What would Grammarly think of it? Grammarly is better at catching dumb mistakes than making something shine I set some goals for the piece, calling it casual and for a general audience. The analysis of this pro's work was more of the same. Grammarly thought the word "character" could be changed to "style" even though the author was referring to a fictional person in this instance. The app wanted "Tell me I look nice" to be "Tell me, I look nice," stripping away all of its power as a command. Could we get a few more commas? Grammarly sure thought so. In short, you have to be confident about what you ignore from Grammarly. It's better at catching dumb mistakes than making something shine. Technology's Understanding of Language When I first learned about Grammarly, I got in touch with a computational linguist who works there, Mariana Romanyshyn. We talked by video conference back in 2016 about how hard it is for computers to parse language and what Grammarly is doing to make computing systems better at it. "Language is very ambiguous," she said. "It's not always possible for a machine to detect even what part of speech a word is." She said Grammarly sometimes makes incorrect suggestions and misses errors because of limitations with part-of-speech taggers. "This ambiguity is a really tricky task for computers to solve." I asked her for some examples. "There's this classic linguistic sentence: The old man the boat. The word 'man' is the verb." In other words, it means, "those who are old are the ones who man the boat." "An automatic language processing system would never be able to detect that," Romanyshyn said. Machines will always assume that "man" is a noun in this context. Another example of a sentence that always tricks computers is one well known to linguists: "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo." It is a grammatically correct sentence. Please puzzle over it for a moment before reading about how to parse it. As far as privacy goes, be careful what you feed into Grammarly, as the company could conceivably see everything it analyzes. PCMag reviewer Ben Moore addresses this topic in detail in his review of Grammarly. Grammarly Makes (Bad) Writing Better Since my first experience with the app, I've used it for a few writing assignments when an editor required that I submit a Grammarly report alongside my copy. Another writing team I worked with gave all its writers a hearty nudge to use the app to catch and correct the kinds of writing faux pas that made one cranky editor crankier. When I'm on a deadline and have only written the first draft, Grammarly does the boring work of finding and bringing to my attention errors, typos, and needless repetition. It's a handy productivity hack. As I mentioned earlier, though, the suggestions are only beneficial when I can confidently throw away the bad ones. Grammarly isn't cheap, either. The free version is limited, and Premium plans cost $30 per month, $60 per quarter, or $144 per year. But when you're on deadline with an important piece of writing that you know could be better, it may be money well spent. Many people need help with their writing, sometimes in high-stakes scenarios. Job seekers working on cover letters only get one chance to make a first impression. Students may find that bad writing makes the difference between passing and failing. And business professionals putting together presentations that make or break their quarter can always use some help. Practically everyone has a vested interest in writing as clearly and as well as they can, and Grammarly can help, if you know enough to take its best suggestions and discard its worst. Works Cited Duffy, Jill. "I Improved My Writing With Grammarly, and So Can You." PC Mag, 21 Jun 2022. https://www.pcmag.com/how-to/i-improved-my-writing... "Should We Let Students Use ChatGPT?" by Natasha Berg This past December, I was sitting around a table having lunch with some English teachers when one of them started sharing how she had recently caught a student cheating on an essay using this new form of artificial intelligence called ChatGPT. She watched in awe, astonishment, and a bit of mild horror as this program constructed an entire essay for the student with the click of a button. The initial reaction around the table was disbelief. There is no way that AI can write a quality essay. Naturally curious, I whipped out my laptop to test it out. All of us watched in shock as this AI program constructed a well-written analysis essay right before our eyes in a matter of seconds. If you’ve ever wondered how to induce an immediate existential crisis amongst a group of English teachers, yeah, that’s how. While there are dozens of text-generative AI programs out there, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which was released to the public this past November, is the most well-known. Since its release, ChatGPT has been featured on almost every major news station and even made it to the cover of Time magazine in February. This program caught the world by storm because it was ten times smarter than the version that had come before it. ChatGPT is what is known as a large language model, which is essentially a network of neural pathway connections that allows the program to learn and become more accurate in its responses over time. When I asked ChatGPT what it wanted the world to know about its capabilities, it responded, “I can provide information on a wide range of topics and understand and respond to natural language. I can also generate creative and personalized responses and learn from my interactions to improve my language processing capabilities over time.” Oh, is that all? Right after its public emergence, companies and people around the world began harnessing the immense power of this technology. Doctors have used it to help diagnose patients. Businesses began using it to create advertisements and blog posts. And Joe Schmo has been using it to help him write all those pesky thank you cards from his wedding 14 months ago. And all of this is being done with the click of a button. Common applications like Snapchat, Instacart, Duolingo, and Quizlet have also begun to integrate this technology into their platforms. And then OpenAI released GPT-4 in March, which is the newest version of the system that powers ChatGPT. GPT-4, unlike ChatGPT, can also analyze images and web links instead of being restricted to text input only. Microsoft began using GPT-4 to power their search engine Bing. They also have plans to integrate GPT-4 with the Microsoft Office Suite products. Soon, you’ll be able to turn your boss’s 20-page email into a comprehensive PowerPoint presentation with a single click. A couple of weeks after Microsoft released their new search engine, Google released their AI system, BARD. And I’m sure it’s only a matter of time until we see artificial intelligence incorporated with the Google Suite products as well. The tech world has entered an AI arms race. But with such an explosive advancement in technology seemingly overnight, educators across the globe have entered a state of panic. Of course, there are the typical concerns about AI taking over the world, courtesy of too many movies and TV shows like Terminator and Westworld. But for educators, the concern lies more with their students. Post-pandemic, educators have noticed severe declines in students’ ability to think critically and problem-solve at the most basic levels. But now, with AI able to do the thinking for them, educators are awash in worry, not merely for their jobs, but for the development of their students. But as author and writing instructor John Warner points out, “The reason the appearance of this tech is so shocking is because it forces us to confront what we value rather than letting the status quo churn along unexamined.” There is no doubt that AI is going to transform the landscape of education as we know it. After all, we’ve seen this type of transformation before, and for most of us, it happened within our lifetimes. The widespread proliferation of the internet just a few decades ago completely transformed how schools and our global economy functioned. Isn’t it safe to assume that a new technological leap might do the same? But the hard work of this leap is going to fall to educators. Generative AI systems will force educators and educational institutions to re-evaluate what they teach and why and how they teach it. Do students really need to know how to write a five-paragraph, rigorously structured essay? Or do they need to understand how to approach a concept, break it down, and organize it into bite-sized pieces? Since the dawn of time, teachers have been posed the question by students, when will I use this in real life? Well, now is the time to come up with a concrete answer to that question. Because the truth is, many of the assignments given in the classroom really don’t prepare students for real life. When are students going to need to know how to diagram a compound, complex sentence? Unless you end up an English teacher, chances are never. If students feel as though what they are learning in the classroom will benefit them in the long run, they will become invested in the learning and won’t be looking for shortcuts to simply get the work done. But instead of embracing and learning from this new technology, many schools across the country responded to the public release of ChatGPT by immediately blocking it and other AI applications on all school-sanctioned devices. But is it beneficial to restrict student use of a technology that businesses around the world are using? Or should we instead teach our students how to interact with AI safely and productively? Anyone that has been around teenagers for any length of time understands all too well the implications of reverse psychology. Even adults fall prey to this trap. If I tell you not to think of an elephant, like whatever you do, don’t think about an elephant. Yeah, we’re all thinking about an elephant right now. If you tell a teenager not to do something, you can bet they’ll be itching to try it out as soon as your back is turned. Blocking ChatGPT and similar AI applications won’t work. It will only make the programs more intriguing for students. Who wouldn’t want to explore the secrets this technology holds that has caused such an adverse reaction amongst their teachers? Plus, we can’t control what students do outside of their classrooms and school buildings. It’s all too easy for students to pull up this program on their phone when they go to the bathroom, or simply access it on a different device when they’re completing their school work at home. And once Microsoft and Google integrate this technology into their Office Suite products, unless we want to regress to the pre-internet age of paper and pencil, we won’t be able to avoid AI in the classroom. We will never be able to truly and fully block it. Instead, we have to find ways to work with and around it. In order to implement effective use of AI in the classroom, teachers may need to re-evaluate how they are teaching the material and assessing student learning. What if, instead of assigning worksheets and essays, we encouraged more collaboration in the classroom? Project-based and student-directed learning have always been my go-tos as an educator. As an English teacher, my students were constantly creating posters and participating in debates in order to analyze various aspects of literary work. They would work on group projects and presentations as their end-of-unit assessment, and we would use gameplay to review material, such as participating in an escape room or a competitive game of Jeopardy. Even if my students were able to access AI in my classroom, it wouldn’t have provided them with much help beyond the ability to be a sounding board for their ideas. And what would be so wrong with that? I think most educators would agree that the goal of education is to help our students learn how to think critically and problem-solve. AI technology can be incorporated into the classroom in ways that actually engage students in critical thinking. Math students could create their own math problems and then use AI to test the results. Social studies students could use ChatGPT to write alternative realities to history and then discuss the results as a class. Science students could use the chatbot to adopt the voice of a famous scientist and then engage in a stimulating conversation about their discoveries. Students can also utilize AI to help edit their writing, practice vocabulary terms, provide individualized tutoring, and edit their ideas and research. And these are just a few of the unlimited applications from the student perspective, but it also has abilities that can benefit teachers. Almost immediately after my school blocked AI on all of our student devices, my coworkers began using it to help them do their jobs more effectively. They used ChatGPT to write lesson plans, come up with discussion prompts, and create tests and quizzes. And I actually used it to help me write a final exam for my students, a process that normally takes me hours, took only 30 minutes with the assistance of AI. Not only does AI have the ability to save hours of preparation time for teachers, but it can also take a piece of writing and adapt it in any way the user asks, which can help make learning and reading more accessible to students of all abilities. For example, we could ask ChatGPT to take a complex text and transform it into something a fourth grader could read. Or we could have it transform Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet into a modern day telenovela. The possibilities are only as limited as the user’s imagination. We are living in a digitally progressive world. Shouldn’t our schools reflect that? As Matt Miller from Ditch That Textbook said, this version of ChatGPT is the weakest, most rudimentary artificial intelligence of its kind our students will ever use. If we are blocking technology in our schools that are being used in businesses across the country and around the world, we aren’t adequately preparing our students to enter the 21st century workforce. Our students need to be trained how to interact with the world around them via the technology at their disposal and how to do so safely. And who will teach them these skills if teachers don’t? But if we also need to give students the benefit of the doubt, just like educators do with other classroom technology, teachers can establish times to utilize AI and times to not. When one educator gave the option for his students to use ChatGPT on an assignment, only four actually took him up on the offer. Many students are just as nervous as their adult counterparts are about this new technology. They too worry about the impact that it will have on their ability to problem solve and become functioning adults who are able to make a positive contribution to the world. In fact, there are many students who don’t know about this new technology. Of course, this will change in the coming months and years. But for now, we have time and we need to use this time to adapt accordingly. Just as the Internet did before it, AI is going to weave its way into every facet of our lives. The process has already started. We’re already carrying around little AI machines in our pockets and purses. And while ChatGPT and GPT-4 are far more advanced than Siri or Alexa, they too will eventually become a staple in our everyday routines. Large language model generative AI is going to change the landscape of the world’s economy and launch us into a new era of education. Schools need to start teaching their students how to use AI safely and effectively. And teachers need to begin reevaluating and redesigning their curriculum so that next year, we’re not sitting around a table in shock as our coworker shares how they just caught a student cheating using whatever form of AI is coming next. Thank you. Works Cited Berg, Natasha. "Should We Let Students Use ChatGPT?" TEDx Talks, 24 Sep 2023. https://lithub.com/why-human-writing-is-worth-defe... "Why Human Writing Is Worth Defending In the Age of ChatGPT" by Naomi S. Baron September 12, 2023 A specter is haunting the landscape—the specter of generative AI. First came fears that student cheating would explode, plus that artists and actors would be unemployed. Then the ante was upped: Some of the very technology’s creators warned that AI’s potential risk to humanity as we know it was on par with pandemics and nuclear war. This cascade of angst was triggered by the launch of ChatGPT by OpenAI in November 2022. Among its wiles, the bot is best known for its prowess at churning out prose. On an existential level, does it matter if AI writes for us? For a non-kneejerk answer, we need to make a serious stab at understanding how writing affects us as people. Most fundamentally, it changes our minds and brains. The classicist Eric Havelock argued in Preface to Plato that development of writing and concomitant spread of literacy in Archaic Greece, even in limited circles, enabled the flowering of Greek philosophical thought. Writing facilitated reflection, logical thinking, and production of tangible texts to foster rethinking. While Havelock’s argument for historical mind change has had its critics, it’s incontrovertible that literacy changes our brains. Thanks to modern neuroscience, we know the brain is “plastic,” meaning it is capable of reorganizing its structure or laying down new pathways, depending upon our physical or mental activities. London cabbies with “the Knowledge” of thousands of routes, streets, and landmarks have larger posterior hippocampi (the area responsible for physical navigation) than control groups. And people who are literate have different brains than those who aren’t. Using MRI scans, Stanislas Dehaene taught us that adults who only learned to read and write later in life increased the density of white and gray matter in brain areas involved in reading. If writing helps us think, what happens when we surrender the process to AI? The literate brain empowers us to use writing as a canvas for witnessing our thoughts. Recall Flannery O’Connor’s much-quoted remark that “I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.” Her sentiment is hardly unique in literary annals. You’ll find it echoed by Horace Walpole, E.M. Forster, Arthur Koestler, George Bernard Shaw, William Faulkner, and, of course, Joan Didion (“I don’t know what I think until I write it down”). If writing helps us think, what happens when we surrender the process to AI? We risk becoming cognitively and expressively disempowered. Start with AI as editor of text we write ourselves. Spellcheck and basic grammar and style edits from Microsoft Word are old news. But newer tools like Grammarly and Microsoft Editor (both now infused with OpenAI’s GPT models) are at once more potent and perilous, especially for less confident writers. Can AI edits be trusted? Some bones of contention are small beer. Word continually instructs me where to put my commas and to be more concise. Sentence-initial “Finally” must be followed by a comma; replace “in the near future” with “soon.” A matter of personal choice, you say. Yet sometimes the advice is flat-out wrong. When I wrote “However we might define ‘good’ writing, it’s more than acing checklists.” Word scolded me for not inserting a comma after “however.” Sorry, Word. A comma doesn’t belong there, since the adverb “however” is modifying “define,” not the whole sentence. More troubling still was the “inclusiveness” flag that Microsoft Editor blandished at me when recently I wrote that Rameshbabu Praggnanandhaa (nickname: Pragg) was “the new Indian wunderkind,” describing a sixteen-year-old who astounded the chess world in early 2022 by beating five-time world champion Magnus Carlsen. Microsoft’s style cop warned that “This language may imply bias against indigenous populations” and suggested I substitute “Indigenous” or “Native American.” Yes, there are indigenous populations in Pragg’s home country. But they’re indigenous to India, and I doubt that’s how Pragg would characterize himself. I knew to ignore Word’s counsel. From Pragg’s Hindu name alone, not to mention the long tradition of playing chess in the country that invented the game, it was obvious to me what “Indian” meant. But writers for whom it wasn’t self-evident might have ended up substituting “Native American,” which would have been absurd. Beyond the issue of trust is that of personal writing voice. Take predictive texting (an early version of generative AI). Harvard research has shown that when we use predictive texting, our vocabulary tends to become more concise and less interesting. The philosopher Evan Selinger warns that this AI shortcut encourages us “not to think too deeply about our words” and to “give others more algorithm and less of ourselves.” Describing predictive texting, a student in one of my studies complained that “I feel like the message I sent is not mine.” AI as editor and author is with us for the long haul. Writers need to make peace with the language genie, while holding fast to the opportunities for thinking and creating that writing bestows on us. Since we all have different aspirations when it comes to writing, the peace we broker must be individual. Approaching our own negotiating tables, here are two considerations to keep in mind. First, beware of deskilling. Like retaining a foreign language, writing takes continuing practice. Nir Eisikovits, a philosopher, warns that the biggest near-term threat of AI is that it will lull us into degrading “abilities and experiences that people consider essential to being human.” I used to ask my students, What do you know when the internet is down? Today’s concern: Are you still capable of writing if an AI editor or text generator is unavailable? Both as a form of personal expression and as an art form, writing is a craft. Second, recognize your level of commitment, especially when something written bears your name. It’s child’s play for the likes of GPT-4 to concoct emails, blog posts, and article summaries. Is that OK with you? If you opt to view use of AI as a collaborative venture, how much are you willing to accept its algorithmic edits or text it has created out of predictive whole cloth? Research by Shakked Noy and Whitney Zhang found that ChatGPT reduced the time humans needed for a writing task, plus improved the quality of the end result. What’s more, 68% of study participants were content to submit ChatGPT’s initial output without doing editing of their own. That’s handing over the keys. The bulk of writing that most of us produce skews impersonal. It’s the everyday tasks of emails and memos, maybe churning out news stories or school assignments, even writing a guide to successful ChatGPT prompts. AI has already proven itself highly adept at such endeavors. But human motivations for writing run deeper. We write to look outward, as with literary works that convey our perspective on the human condition. We write to look inward, including to find out what we’re thinking. We write for personal release, be it a diary entry or angry letter to an employer. All this writing is grounded in human sentience, of which AI has none. AI has no drive to better people’s lives, impart what it is thinking, or convey emotion. When it comes to weighing commitment, also remember that both as a form of personal expression and as an art form, writing is a craft. How we chose our words and sentences is as vital as the meaning they convey. I keep harkening back to a passage in Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer: “Writing…[is] done one word at a time, one punctuation mark at a time. It require[s] what a friend called ‘putting every word on trial for its life’: changing an adjective, cutting a phrase, removing a comma, and putting the comma back.” If we cede to AI final say about words and even commas, we jeopardize more than artistic pride. We risk convincing ourselves that in the name of efficiency, it’s harmless for AI to assume ever wider swaths of what we previously would have written ourselves. Don’t get me wrong. I’m no troglodyte when it comes to partnering with AI in the writing enterprise. Rather, my counsel is not to lose sight of the precious tool that writing offers us for shaping our minds and brains, for articulating our own ideas, and for sharing them with fellow humans. Works Cited Baron, Naomi S. "Why Human Writing Is Worth Defending In the Age of ChatGPT." Literary Hub, 12 Sep 2023. https://lithub.com/why-human-writing-is-worth-defending-in-the-age-of-chatgpt/
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