ChatGPT is a Game Changer for Students, But Not in the Way You Think
Automated writing platforms have the capacity to foster rather than degrade literacy. It's time we started thinking about how.
In the last year, automated writing platforms like ChatGPT have taken the world by storm. Much of the discussion around them has focused on their misuse—how they spell the death of academic integrity, rob creators of opportunities to profit from their art, and most damagingly, exacerbate present day inequalities. But reframing these technologies as tools rather than weapons may enable us to support one demographic that has traditionally been excluded from education and civic life, the illiterate.
In the United States, about 1 in 5 adults is functionally illiterate, meaning they cannot read and comprehend relatively short text. Around the world, 757 million people are illiterate. Unsurprisingly, developing countries struggle with illiteracy more than developed ones, where functional illiteracy thrives, substantiating how access to high-impact literacy has not only become a privilege but also something that demands more immediate action and correction.
ChatGPT can help functionally illiterate individuals in several ways, including its ability to orally summarize text that a computer can then read aloud, or its ability to receive inputs of ungrammatical typed or dictated text that can then be corrected. Disadvantaged male adolescents, who are historically underrepresented in the pursuit of sophisticated literacy skills, report the most difficulties here: a higher rate of social pressure often exists with respect to not reading or not wanting to read, and young boys are sometimes socialized into believing that reading is simply uncool. As a result, male students are more likely to fall behind their female counterparts—by high school, some estimate that gap is almost too large to patch. One opportunity exists to implement ChatGPT into a student’s Individualized Education Plan (IEP) as a modification that could level the playing field and create more equitable outcomes in pursuit of their success. Rather than banning it in schools, we may consider teaching with it.
More powerfully, this technology can help functionally illiterate individuals meet the writing demands of everyday life. By high school, a functionally illiterate student who’s asked to produce an essay has a few major recourses. The first involves struggling to put inadequate words on the page and in that struggle, sometimes giving up entirely. The second involves calling upon heavy assistance from peers and online technologies that often get students in trouble under the traditional definitions of academic plagiarism. But what if we harnessed automated writing platforms to share in authorship for students working along the literacy continuum or even multilingual students? After all, if our true goal is the growth of thinking and writing, then the generous assist that platforms like ChatGPT can provide may enable students to start by seeing themselves as capable practitioners whose relationship with these technologies would change, gradually becoming less dependent on them in the authorship of their own texts as their own abilities evolve. A calculated coaching model between student and paraprofessional may empower students in this position to exercise their own agency in pursuit of developing new skills. Certain parameters will need to be enforced, especially given this technology’s current limitations, and careful stewardship between human and AI should always be part of the equation, but the subsequent learning associated with this experience could become a valuable insight into the modern process of composition in particular and literacy in general.
In the disability community, chatbots have already generated hope for a more equitable future that can coach students on conversation, and ultimately teach them independence. They have also been utilized to help students with dyslexia. They have even enabled individuals to work through the stressful and time-consuming experience of disclosing a disability. All of these tasks require advanced literacy that is best developed through scaffolded supports in primary school. But many individuals never receive these supports, much less know they even qualify for them. What would the world look like if more people gained access to learning about these supports on their own terms?
While most would agree that asking ChatGPT to produce an entire essay is unethical, we should consider the benefits of employing pre-established parameters to generate the appropriate scaffolds needed to help students jumpstart their thinking. For instance, the platform could be asked to generate a list of 10 metaphors in a play, or build a simple outline for an essay dealing with conflict in a literary excerpt. Efforts to utilize AI for individualized tutoring have been well documented, and evidence supports the fact that these technologies are making meaningful change. Finally, these technologies have already been functioning in the background of popular language apps such as Duolingo, Carnegie Learning, and Quizlet.
In composition, for instance, chatbots can be asked to create templates to help foster thinking and writing, a process which already stands as one of the best ways to help resistant writers begin the act of composition. In the spirit of writing manuals such as They Say/I Say: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing, these templates could then be adapted for immediate use in the classroom and beyond. Authorship, which is traditionally seen as an act of solitary creation, can now be made more collaborative in the pursuit of developing our students’ skills rather than banning this technology, which only drives it further underground.
While it’s easy to see how these platforms could be used as crutches, nascent research in literacy indicates that they can be utilized responsibly. Consider a 2021 study that aimed to measure how chatbots could be used as an inclusive tool for people with disabilities. The study found that a majority of people with speech and literacy difficulties benefitted from utilizing a tool to reframe and rephrase language for the user to then manipulate and make their own. Or a project from the University of Queensland that harnessed similar language models to provide therapy, education, and virtual companionship. One study with conversational agents even demonstrated promise in using chatbots to enhance online video lectures for students who may be struggling to keep up. Where used ethically, automation may serve as a step on the gradual release of responsibility model inherent in learning any new idea or skill. Doubtless, this will require significant work, but the uncomfortable (or perhaps comforting) reality is that these automated writing platforms are here to stay.
For students with advanced literacy, ChatGPT is an opportunity to refine their critical thinking within a workshop model. As a college professor, I recently asked students to utilize this technology to draft an entire essay. They then broke off into groups, annotated the essay’s strengths and shortcomings, articulating where the technology struggled with cohesion, vocabulary, and conveying an authentic tone, common failings of artificial intelligence language systems. Afterwards, they rewrote the essay with the main goal of improving their content and style, borrowing material as they saw fit from the ChatGPT essay. They presented their new creations along with a subsequent analysis justifying why every authorial decision they made was an improvement on the AI creation. The activity inspired lively debate about the features of this technology and how it can teach us more about our own writing styles and identities. Of course limitations exist, perhaps the most striking being that large language models are good at generating verbal nonsense. This reaffirms our need to better study them and weigh the value of their implementation: they are imperfect and will continue being imperfect—the fact that they remain newly explored territory in literary studies may also provide an opportunity to help evolve the field, which in itself is necessary for its survival.
The results generated by ChatGPT may greatly benefit students in their academic pursuits. By allowing them to better understand their own needs and tailor their research, ChatGPT can act as a potential tool for learning and growth. However, these technologies shouldn’t be seen as a replacement for human interaction and critical thinking, and I am not calling for the replacement of teachers, paraprofessionals, or creators by AI holograms; too often, arguments about AI’s efficiency and benevolence have been veiled arguments in favor of exploitation. Instead, chatbots may become a tool that can support and enhance a student’s learning process when used responsibly and in conjunction with the guidance of a teacher. Much work remains to be done. The key is to view AI as a co-author, rather than a source of wholesale plagiarism, which will always remain unethical. Embracing this mindset will encourage students to responsibly harness the power of automated writing platforms and continue to grow and evolve in their learning. While technology can never replace the human touch of a teacher, ChatGPT may serve as a tool to support and enhance the learning process for everyone involved.
Note: One section of this article was co-authored with ChatGPT.