When you were a student, you probably realized that your teachers did not assign papers for the joy of reading your insights about the Fertile Crescent or the American Labor Movement or the foreshadowing in 1984.

It might have seemed as if they just needed something to grade you on.

But many educators would agree that the reason they give writing assignments

is that the writing process is a learning process.

Producing even a mediocre term paper requires organization and analysis

and some grasp of the material,

all of which become unnecessary if a student can feed essay prompts to chat GPT and get the work

done instantly. From KERA in Dallas, this is think. I'm Chris Boyd. Is this cheating? Many people

would agree it is. But even greater than concerns about

students receiving better grades than they deserve is the concern that they're not getting the

education they require. They're literally not learning how to learn. And educators are just

starting to figure out what to do about that. Clay Shirky is is Vice Provost for AI and Technology and Education at New York University.

His article for The Chronicle of Higher Education is headlined,

is AI enhancing education or replacing it?

Clay, welcome to think.

Thank you so much.

For those of us who have not used AI a lot or maybe who haven't written a term paper in a while,

and I realize the Venn diagram may be quite large in those two categories, will you just start

by explaining what it takes to get chat GPT or some similar platform to crank out whatever a teacher

or a professor might ask for? Sure. And this is one of the things

where, as you were saying in the introduction, educators are just grappling with this.

Student practice is changing around this, too. Students are getting better at using these tools

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