Ep 28 - Anticipating the impact of AI-based writing on education and assessment

Lucinda McKnight | Senior Lecturer in Education (Pedagogy and Curriculum) School of Education, Faculty of Arts and Education, Deakin University

In this video, Lucinda McKnight, Senior Lecturer in Education (Pedagogy and Curriculum) at Deakin University, discusses her specialisation in the writing discipline and how artificial intelligence and neural language generators specifically, are poised to disrupt the writing process as we know it.

Expanding on her recent article in The Conversation about a paradigm shift in the role of writing in our professional and academic lives, Lucinda explains the significant evolution in a neural language generator called GPT-3, between 2019 and 2020. Using ‘deep learning’ to produce human-like text, it’s already being deployed in industries (and by students), bringing us closer to a future of written work authored by ‘bots’ or ‘AI writers’.

Presenting far-reaching challenges to competitive assessment and the education sector’s focus on integrity and originality, Lucinda remarks on the lack of dialogue by institutions to address these developments, and the need to renegotiate what writing is, what's it going to be, and how we judge the quality of writing. But as James Thorley asks, can institutions change their thinking and assessment fast enough that they won't get outflanked by the inexorable rise of AI writing?

Commenting on the fact that AI-written work isn’t detectable by text similarity or plagiarism checkers due to being original text, Lucinda asserts that new benchmarks for authorship and fairness will need to be developed, with more emphasis on a student’s process as opposed to the final, summative output.

Finally, Lucinda discusses AI writing’s currency in a workplace setting versus an education setting, and the need to reconcile any clashes regarding institutions’ expectations of student authenticity and industry’s demands for work-readiness, reinforcing that is an issue we need to confront now, and embrace rather than fear.

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Read Lucinda McKnight’s popular article on AI-based writing in The Conversation which inspired this Integrity Matters episode.
https://theconversation.com/to-succeed-in-an-ai-world-students-must-learn-the-human-traits-of-writing-152321