All the AI bros and fiends chomping at the bit to unleash this stuff with user-friendly UX don’t seem to care at all ethically about how this will affect a bunch of different tasks that involve coordinating, assessing, grading, reviewing submitted prose writing (editors, teachers, lecturers, appraisers, etc). Imagine the feeling of spending time and effort trying to carefully analyse a document as if it was created with intent and as if the sender (‘author’) will gain value from such a response, and then finding out that it was a miserable textdump from a stochastic parrot.
Yes, this is also a massive ethical failure on the part of the sender (‘author’) and arguably highlights institutional flaws in assessing and grading, but it is what it is.
The reality for universities is that academic codes of conduct are firmly fixed in place. None of this is permitted but the floodgates are opening and nobody at the administrative level is ready to have the high level discussions around how to address it beyond individual punishment and regressive online proctoring surveillence systems (another rent-seeking tech grift of course), yet the behavioural incentives to tick boxes and cut corners are obviously there, which is why the main people warning about this now are lecturers, TAs, course coordinators—people at the coal face who know what is going to happen.
One of the interesting things about teaching design is that we are somewhat insulated from this potential onslaught right now. It’s like, if you submit a generated assignment that meets the brief, you’ve basically achieved something on the forefront of research into computational creativity. And you can’t really generate a retrospective or project report this way either.
So good luck to students who want to try, but it will end up being way more work than just doing the work. Don’t know how courses with much more short-essay based requirements are going to fare though. I understand why people are concerned.
I just think as well as focusing on the interesting possibilities of what we could do with this technology, we should also focus on mitigating the futility and waste of human potential as a result of spraying language like a firehose.