The erosion of creativity

Just as ChatGPT allows its users to automate mundane writing tasks, it also makes cheating on essays and research papers easier than ever before. Honor Council representative Austina Xu (12) believes some students now use AI tools to generate assignments without any detectable plagiarism.

“Students are definitely using it for academics; at least, I hear people saying that they are to finish their assignments last minute,” Austina said. “And that’s something that’s hard to track. I would say those kids probably adjust the wording afterwards to make it a bit less noticeable.”

Having tested ChatGPT for a presentation within Honor Council, however, Austina thinks it’s merely another way to cheat on assignments rather than a catch-all solution for students who procrastinate. She instead hopes students will use its summarization and rewording capabilities to learn about complex concepts in simple terms, or to write more quickly in non-academic situations.

“The quality of writing isn’t that great, especially for like analysis essays, and it’s often incorrect,” Austina said. “With regards to the honor code, it is another complication, but I don’t see it as any different from something like SparkNotes or LitCharts. It looks potentially useful for more mundane writing tasks like writing emails, resumes or instructions. Especially for people who don’t speak English, it could actually be a really useful tool.”

Library Director Lauri Vaughan even believes it could set a new baseline for what qualifies as good writing. Within education, it could even become a means of eliminating basic grammatical errors from students’ writing early on.

“I remembered having a conversation with a teacher not too long ago about having all the students create a ChatGPT-generated first draft,” Vaughan said. “How cool it would be be able to start with a bunch of essays that don’t have grammatical errors riddled all over them? I can then take the next step with these kids, like talking about transitions. We don’t have to get rid of all the lazy grammar; that’s already been taken care of for us. We’re starting at level two.”

These new AI tools can even attempt to simulate human creativity. The DALL-E 2 image generation model, based on a modified version of GPT-3, can transform a drawing request into a full piece in a matter of seconds. Some artists have criticized DALL-E 2 as a tool that doesn’t create real art, but rather steals styles and motifs from existing artwork to generate its images. But as an artist and writer herself, Austina has a broader definition of what qualifies as art.

“You could tell [DALL-E 2] to create art in the styles of different artists, and it does a pretty good job because their work is out there on the internet,” Austina said. “I was pretty impressed at it’s sheer range. I know some people don’t view that as art, but my definition of art is pretty loose. That being said, obviously the idea of a human conceiving that art is gone when an AI is creating it, and I still think that’s something that adds more depth to a piece.”

In many ways, advancements in AI technology are actually raising the bar for creativity. If anyone can create a painting or a poem merely by sending OpenAI a text prompt, the expression and emotion behind human-created art becomes that much more meaningful.

But if artificial intelligence can imagine a brand-new painting from a prompt just as a human can, what’s so “artificial” about it? Where do we draw the line between intellectual mimicry and original thought?