To short-circuit the higher education AI apocalypse, we must embrace generative AI
The rapid improvement of generative AI tools has led many of my peers to proclaim that higher education as we know it has come to a crashing and shocking end. I agree.
In my large-enrollment general education course at the University of Florida, I can no longer assign an essay asking students to state their views on genetic engineering and assume the responses I receive are written by humans. So the critical question we must ask as academics is, “What do we do now?”
Rather than try to create assignments that AI cannot tackle, I propose we develop assignments that embrace AI text generation.
We don’t want to ignore the 54 percent of students who use AI at least weekly in their course assignments, according to the Digital Education Council. We don’t want to ban AI. And even when we, as educators, try to trick AI tools, newer versions of ChatGPT just come along to thwart that strategy.
With this in mind, I modified the final assignment in my course to require that students submit an entirely AI-generated first draft, which they then modified to reflect their own perspectives. In the first couple of semesters using this strategy, students color-coded the sources of text to mark which parts were human-generated and which were AI-generated. This strategy allowed students to use and reflect on how they would utilize AI in the future.
Tracking of text origin was further streamlined using the recently released “Authorship” tool from Grammarly, which accurately attributes text as “typed by a human” or “copied from a source/AI-generated.” Advancements in technology have upended the careful development of assessments in higher education before and will continue to in the future, even if AI appears to be an all-encompassing, do-everything tool.