Welcome to The Phoenix’s weekly digest. Every week during the quarter, you can expect our writers’ takes on some campus happenings.

This week, managing editor Owen Yingling responds to the AI-prompted replacement of papers as a mode of assessment in humanities courses at the College.

On Tuesday, the Philosophy Department hosted a “forum” in Rosenwald 015 where “students [could] share their thoughts about how AI-related changes to syllabi are affecting their classes.” I’d like to imagine it was a meaty and thoughtful discussion and not at all like the pointless monologing, confusion, and boredom many philosophy majors experience in their frequently attended version of a “forum” — the mandatory discussion section. 

Unfortunately for our readers, we’re in the middle of midterms season and I can’t be bothered to do any reporting. So, I thought it was worth monopolizing The Phoenix’s Weekly Digest and using some of the more egregious rhetorical techniques I’ve picked up from my own humanities discussion sections to do a retread of this “vital” topic. 

In case you’re not a humanities student or you’re one of the few to avoid a dramatic syllabus change in a class or two, the situation is this: many humanities classes have recently replaced written papers with in-class exams. Why? Because humanities professors are worried about students using AI to write their papers.

Nobody likes this. Students, because it means they have to study all of their course material, not just the ten or so sentences they end up using in their papers, and professors and TAs, perhaps because they don’t want to have to read stale regurgitated facts made unintelligible by their students’ awful handwriting. (As ridiculous as this objection might sound, I can’t help but empathize. When I was in high school, I was called into my English teacher’s office to spend twenty minutes helping him decipher what I had scrawled in an in-class exam. Perhaps I have a skewed perception of how big a problem this is.)

This, of course, raises a further question—the heart of the matter: “Can AI write a decent UChicago undergraduate humanities paper?” But, like any philosophical question, the answer really depends on what we mean by “write,” “undergraduate,” “paper,” and “decent.” 

Let’s be honest: could ChatGPT write you a nice two-page glorified SOSC discussion post you could disguise and turn in as a 750 to 1000-word paper? Obviously. If you’re being extra lazy, could ChatGPT turn the grade on your HUM paper from an F (since you don’t feel like writing anything at all) to a C (or maybe even a B-)? Probably. From a B- to an A? Less likely. 

But will ChatGPT be much help in your three-hour, once-a-week, mostly graduate student seminar with a comically French professor on Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, where the only assignment is one twenty-page paper due at the end of the quarter? I doubt it. 

I’m not saying every humanities class should be one giant paper, but if professors and students are really so annoyed about having in-person exams, there are obviously ways to structure writing assignments that aren’t five-paragraph essays and are then much less amenable to AI usage.

Let’s face it, even at UChicago, humanities professors are grading on a curve. So, the students who use AI the most on assignments are likely not even getting much better grades than they would have otherwise. Should we allow these students to hold the rest of us hostage to blue books and fold-out desks? We already impose multiple quarter suspensions on students caught cheating, so humanities classes would be able to significantly deter cheating on papers if professors and TAs just took a closer look at what they’re given and dealt with AI usage according to the rules we already have. 

Sure, in a year or two from now, AI will probably be able to get an undetectable A in your hardest seminar class, but in the meantime? Just let us write papers.

Stay tuned for next week’s edition. In the meantime, if you have any thoughts, disagreements, or words of support, we want to hear them! Write to us at thechicagophoenix@gmail.com.