GoKawiilIn the previous installment of this series on the future of higher education, I talked with professors about the ways that A.I. has changed their classrooms. Most felt despair over the breakdown of a contract between student and teacher, one predicated on the faith that, even if students weren’t always perfect, they would at least challenge themselves to think every once in a while. If students rely on A.I. summaries to do their “reading” for them, if they don’t attempt to put their ideas into prose, are they really learning anything?
When I consider the original question of this series—whether my nine-year-old daughter will go to college—I find myself wondering whether she will actually struggle through the writing process in that old-fashioned way. Readers will always want literature written by humans, but, for everything else—e-mails, advertising copy, legal briefs, student papers—the resistance to A.I.-generated writing will almost certainly slip as technology improves and it becomes functionally impossible to see the difference between writing by a person and writing by a machine. When that happens, the major incentive that educators hold over students—“I will fail you if you cheat”—will disappear, because there will simply be no way to know.
With that in mind, I want to take a step back from the implications of A.I. for higher education and ask a more fundamental question: How far are we from that moment? Right now, I believe it’s still easy for people to spot obvious examples of A.I. writing. A professor who reads hundreds of papers and has a decent grasp of her students’ writing ability can recognize the fakes. A manager who starts getting tidy, bullet-pointed, and mostly cheery e-mails from her employees will rightly suspect that robots have autocompleted their messages. Robot writing is also frequently filled with tells: copious em dashes, “not X but Y” constructions, conspicuous verbs (“delve” comes to mind).
But those tells generally show up only in Claude’s most rudimentary outputs. What about the kind of prose that we actually want to read? Can Claude produce that?
This question, or some version of it, was asked by thousands of enraged readers during the past couple of weeks, after the literary magazine Granta published a Commonwealth Prize-winning story by a writer named Jamir Nazir that seemed to bear all the hallmarks of A.I. writing. People noted the strange recurrence of the word “hum,” for instance, and, especially, the awkward, constipated metaphors that didn’t make much sense. The publisher of Granta then put out a bizarrely ambivalent statement, concluding that “perhaps we never will know” whether A.I. had written the story. Nazir, for his part, rebutted the allegation. A whole bunch of writers screamed that the end times had arrived, or, less persuasively, insisted that the reason A.I. writing could win the Commonwealth Prize was that literary fiction was in such a bad place. (Is literary fiction better or worse today than it was twenty or thirty or forty years ago? I have no idea, but I do know that every generation of writers has made more or less the same complaint.)