How is artificial intelligence impacting writing?

 

Dr. Lucinda McKnight Senior Lecturer, Deakin University.

Dr. Lucinda McKnight outlines the ways artificial intelligence (AI) is changing the nature of writing and explores implications for schools.

As a senior lecturer in curriculum and pedagogy at Deakin University, I have been researching how teachers are facing dramatic changes to society’s understanding of what writing is. Already a significant amount of what we read on the internet is created by artificial intelligence (AI) via natural language generators (NLGs). NLGs are machines that can string together words and sentences that make ‘sense’. Students can simply enter a few words prompts into an AI writer site, for free, and an essay is created for them in seconds. Like paid contract cheating, in which paid human writers in essay mills write original essays to specifications, this kind of writing is not detectable by standard plagiarism detection software. And any piece of writing can be put into an AI spinner which will generate hundreds of different versions through paraphrasing, again undetectably. A single student can get AI to write one essay, and then a version for every class member, in seconds.

It may seem odd then, that the latest guide to contract cheating from a global plagiarism software company, Turnitin, does not even mention AI. It seems that both industry and education have been caught out by recent dramatic improvements in the capabilities and availability of AI writers. AI will be a huge disrupter for all roles requiring writing. Even with the tools currently available, robots are producing news reports, sports bulletins, company prospectuses, scripts, novels, poetry, and countless other forms of writing. In education, teachers will use it to write lesson plans, assessments, and reports. Academics will use it to write articles. Already start-up companies are vying to target lucrative markets with specifically tailored versions of AI writers. This is the future of writing.