Last spring, Raina Shah and the other juniors in her English class at the Wheatley School, a public high school on Long Island, had to read the novel Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut. What followed was one of the hardest assignments the students had all year: a creative personal essay.
The assignment, she told me, was to write a Vonnegut-style, fictional essay about life in the future, informed by formative experiences of each student’s past. Shah’s classmates, she told me, “put their memories along with the assignment instructions into ChatGPT and submitted whatever it spit out.”
Shah, 17, wasn’t surprised to see so many students struggle. Many hadn’t written an essay on their own during high school, which didn’t seem to bother her teachers that much. Friends of hers who have relied on artificial intelligence have received notes from the teacher saying “ ‘This vocabulary is a little advanced. I’d like to hear it in your own voice next time,’ with a bunch of smiley faces.”
