Roundtable Series: Is the College Essay Dead? Teaching, Writing, and Thinking in the Age of ChatGPT
Join a panel of faculty from the EKU Philosophy and Religion program in a discussion of artificial intelligence, writing, thinking, and teaching. AI systems like ChatGPT can generate detailed essays and other written content. Some are fearful that these technologies will lead to an uptick in academic dishonesty: students will have computers write their essays for them! How warranted is this fear? What can teachers do about it? Are there ways in which these systems might be useful in teaching writing and critical thinking? What challenges or opportunities are presented by AI text generators beyond the classroom? We will look at ChatGPT and some recent discussion of the technology. All are welcome to attend and participate.
Recommended reading: Stephen Marche’s essay in The Atlantic, “The College Essay is Dead” and this post about the ethics of using ChatGPT from the Oxford University Practical Ethics Blog: “It has become possible to use cutting-edge AI language models to generate convincing high school and undergraduate essays. Here’s why that matters”.
This event will take place on Wednesday, January 25, 2023, 3:30pm-4:30pm in the Main Library, Room 208.
Please direct any questions to the series organizer: Matthew.Pianalto@eku.edu (Phone: 859-622-2979)
Roundtable schedule: https://philosophy.eku.edu/roundtable-discussions