“Students Need to Learn How to Prompt an AI, and Evaluate Its Accuracy and Originality”

• “To remain competitive throughout their careers, students need to learn how to prompt an AI writing tool to elicit worthwhile output and know how to evaluate its quality, accuracy and originality.”

• “They need to learn to compose well-organized, coherent essays involving a mix of AI-generated text and traditional writing. As professionals working into the 2060s and beyond, they will need to learn how to engage productively with AI systems, using them to both complement and enhance human creativity with the extraordinary power promised by mid-21st-century AI.”

• “Honor code or not, many students will be unable to resist the temptation to seek AI assistance with their writing. Future versions of AI will get better at emulating human writing—including to the point of emulating the style of the particular person who is using it. In the resulting arms race, the AI writing tools will always be one step ahead of the tools to detect AI text.”

• “Some students who use ChatGPT despite a ban would avoid having their writing flagged as AI-assisted. Some students would be falsely accused of using ChatGPT, triggering enormous stress and potentially leading to punishment for a wrong they did not commit.”

• “Writing is a craft worthy of enormous respect, one which few of us ever master. But most students don’t aspire to become professional writers. Instead, they are preparing for careers where they will write to further goals beyond the production of writing. As we do today, they will write to communicate, explain, convince, memorialize, request and persuade. AI writing tools, when properly used, will help them do those things better.”

• The New York Times: What Students Are Saying About ChatGPT