ChatGPT Forces Us to Rethink Student Effort and Laziness

The student experience has always involved a combination of work and play. According to a recent survey, more than a quarter of those who have attended college or university admit that "partying" was among their motives for going. With the emergence of ChatGPT in education, students of the future will be presented with new opportunities for laziness. This AI technology is capable of writing original university essays in an instant. We're heading towards a fully automated student experience. In the future, there will be two kinds of students: those up all night writing their essays and those who, having used ChatGPT, will be heard partying across the hall. But what will it mean to be a lazy student in the age of ChatGPT?

The Cambridge dictionary defines lazy as "not willing to work or use any effort." If we look within ourselves, most of us will find some amount of laziness. But most of us also realize that there are different reasons for being work-shy. One reason for avoiding work, which will become increasingly common in the future as we are surrounded by AI, is that we view the work we are assigned as busywork.

Busywork, according to the same dictionary, is "work that you are given or give yourself mainly so that you have something to do, rather than because it is really necessary." It is not lazy to have an aversion to doing pointless work. Such an aversion can also be the response of a relatively psychologically unconflicted person who sees that more satisfaction can be obtained from our finite lives if busywork is avoided.

With ChatGPT, we are faced with the surprising possibility that university essay writing will become widely viewed as busywork. Writing an essay yourself rather than using ChatGPT could be seen as similar to performing calculations by hand when perfectly good calculators are begging to be used.

In fact, a subgroup of students and their instructors have always viewed essay writing as busywork, but for different reasons. They argue that writing standard academic essays is a hoop to jump through which has very little benefit in the real world. When most students sit down to write an essay, they aren't aiming to grapple with the issues in pursuit of truth, but rather to piece together five paragraphs that impress the instructor.

But people who have argued against the essay have often proposed replacing it with other kinds of student writing, like movie reviews or blog posts. This makes less sense in the era of ChatGPT because AI does just as well at these writing tasks as it does at producing student essays.

The proliferation of AI will make people rethink the purpose of human effort in various activities. In education, we will need to ask fundamental questions about the gains that will come from student effort.

Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan claimed that knowledge can serve as a defense against truth. On this view, discourse in academia and in other bureaucratic spaces can morph into rationalization, into argument for argument's sake. This contrasts with the kind of radical questioning that occurs in other forms of discourse, such as revolutionary science and clinical psychoanalysis. In psychoanalysis, the patient is asked to practice the method of saying what comes to their mind. Because the analyst is not in the role of an expert who is providing answers or solutions, truths about the patient's inner world can emerge over time. In the era of ChatGPT, the purpose of education may come to be seen as furthering human meaning that cannot be outsourced to AI.

Teaching will also inevitably begin to change. In an Academics Anonymous letter, one instructor admitted to their students that their essays were being marked by "a semi-employed 30-something on a zero-hours contract, sitting at home in pajamas, staring at a hopeless pile of marking." Having marked 20 essays in one sitting, all of the student work would "blur into one." Disaffected instructors will not be interested in busywork any more than their students. It's hard to imagine anything more pointless than grading a ChatGPT essay. It is quite possible that in the future, teachers will use ChatGPT to grade students' ChatGPT essays.