Press the Button

Over the summer, I took part in the wonderful Southampton Writers Conference on Long Island, and had an eye-opening experience. Such events, in addition to running an inspiring lecture series, provide the means of striking interesting and informative conversation with writing and teaching colleagues, strangers but not strangers.

I shared a lunch one day with several high school and college instructors. (I teach creative writing at Stony Brook University part-time.) They had some curiosity. They wanted to know how good my student writers were. Surprisingly, I had not been asked this question in the past, and struggled a moment with a response.

Admittedly, I can be very picky. Although I am gentle with criticism, you will hear from me on matters as small as a misplaced comma or missing apostrophe. I told my lunchmates that the students' writing was good but not great, and that I am quite fussy with every element that comprises a good story, including punctuation, grammar, spelling, and, of course, content and style.

That being said, I also added that my students this past semester were quite different in two aspects:

1) Their writing was notably better on the whole than most of what I've seen over recent years.

2) They were quieter than previous classes. I had to call on students very often to spark conversation and give opinion.

In unison, my friends around the lunch table responded, "That's because they are using AI."

At first, I questioned this, saying that the works still had considerable line-level issues and such, while overall the pieces were of better quality.

"You can have AI bake in some improper uses of English and storytelling, to try and convince the teacher the work is genuine."

Lightbulb moment. Had my students actually done this? Is that why they were so quiet?

It has been a month since the writing conference, and this matter has yet to leave that area of the brain reserved for worry and fear and all those feelings no one should ever have.

I decided to put AI to the test myself. Since I also teach IT part-time at a neighboring college, I fed into ChatGPT a technical business problem, one I had been using for years, designed by myself. This material was not in any textbook. The answer I received from the AI tool was spot on, several paragraphs in length. I could not have answered the question better.

Then I put the first half of a short piece of fiction I was writing into the application and asked it to complete the story preserving the style, giving some general guidance on where the plot should go. Fail! I was not happy with the result at all. Since the tool takes feedback and offers to try again giving further direction, that I did, citing what was wrong and reiterating preservation of style and general premise. Fail again! The result read comprehensibly, but was not at all what I was looking for, was not at all me.

Unlike baseball, here, two strikes and you're out. I gave up trying to coax the tool into something close to what I wanted.

Many colleges have recently attempted to address the concerns of students using AI by appointing a special committee. Teaching staff at my schools were instructed not to confront students directly when it is suspected AI was used for assignments, but rather send the work to this body for investigation. What this investigation entails, I do not know.

In talking about the whole matter with colleagues closer to home, the general feeling is that no one knows what to do about it all. To some, this is causing a good deal of distress and alarm. Can everything bright and holy under the sun that is art be generated with the virtual press of a button and held in the same positive light as that which required swink and ingenuity, care and thoughtfulness?

For now, I suppose I will just relay to my writing students the results of this test I had done. That in the technical space, AI can be quite good, given its sanctioned use. But when creativity comes into play, harnessing the brain to bring out great style, intriguing and unique plot lines, and all that we truly appreciate in literature, we still have a long way to go.

I hope we never get there. I hope that I never hear an author mumble under their breath, in response to a question from an admiring fan about what inspired the story they fell in love with, "I don't quite know. I just pressed a button."

  — J Levens