Kristi Girdharry

For students, if AI can write their essays in seconds, what is the point of anything?

Does using large language models make students worse at thinking?

And if so, how best can we teach them?

Well, one English professor says the real lesson people need to understand is that learning isn't what to write, but learning is knowing when to struggle.

I am here with Christy Gerd Harry, an English professor at Babson College.

Christy, welcome to the show.

So you're an English prof. I could generate an essay and submit it to you right now in 30 seconds.

This presents kind of a crisis in teaching, doesn't it?

Like AI, is it good?

Is it bad?

Or is it more complicated than good or bad?

Even if you use it to kind of generate everything and you string along, you get B minuses, whatever, fine, you get your degree, you don't get caught.

At the very end of it, like, what have you learned?

That's the scary thing.

You've kind of robbed yourself of that experience of learning.

I'm going to take you on a little tangent here.

I used to do a lot of standup comedy and early on when I was doing it, someone who was kind of like better than me, mentoring me, whatever, said you should never steal jokes.

And it's not because if you steal a joke, you get called out and you get called a hack and joke thievery is this taboo thing in comedy.

But when you do that, you've robbed yourself of the creative process of like writing a mediocre joke, performing it, it not going well, rewriting it, restructuring it, thinking how you might write a good joke and through that process developing your voice.

So really the crime is not to the comedian you've stolen from, which it is, but you've really robbed yourself of that process.