At Hill School, AI Can Offer The Write Stuff

At Hill School, AI Can Offer The Write Stuff

By Leonard Shapiro

Over the Christmas holiday break, friends sent Hunt Lyman a gift he believes will keep on giving—a link to one of many emerging artificial intelligence (AI) websites, specifically one called ChatGPT.

Hunt Lyman, Hill School’s academic dean.

Photo by Doug Gehlsen

Hunt is a long-time educator and dean of academics at Hill School in Middleburg who teaches English to fourth and eighth graders. He had been vaguely familiar with a website that, on command with the proper prompts, can compose an essay, a poem, a book report, a newspaper article and so much more.

“At first I thought what they’d sent me was a joke,” he said of his AI gift. “Then I listened to a New York Times podcast about it and I got really interested.”

Clearly, this is no joke, especially to a teacher trying to instruct elementary and middle school students how to write.

“It’s recipe writing,” he said. “ChatGPT does a competent job, not brilliant, but definitely serviceable. My first thought was ‘how do I keep kids away from it?’ But then I thought, ‘how can I actually use it?’ I also knew that some schools would ban it, but there’s no way to ban it. Then you start to think, ‘how can I use it as a writing tool?’”

“I’m using it to show them the writing process. This is what a topic sentence should be, an expository paragraph. It’s about brainstorming ideas, collecting information, outlining and then a rough draft, editing a rough draft and then the finished product. The one thing it does is de-mystify the process.”

He and many other educators also are well aware of the problems and ethical concerns ChatGPT and other rapidly developing AI sites have the potential to cause.

A college sophomore has a book report to write on The Grapes of Wrath but never read the book. Now it’s Thursday and the report is due on Friday. Type some key words into ChatGPT and there it is within seconds—-a book report that might even be worthy of an A to an unsuspecting professor or teaching assistant.

Still, it’s not infallible.

“ChatGBT is not always accurate,” Hunt said. “Say you want to have a student write an essay on the important women in the life of Scout (a key character in the novel “To Kill a Mockingbird”). It will write about Scout’s mother, and the book does mention her, but she’s not a character because she’s dead when the story begins. It’s called hallucinations. It will make stuff up. If you use it, you’ve still got to edit it, verify it, check the facts, so it’s not infallible.”

Hunt has occasionally experimented with ChatGBT. He once requested a Shakespearean sonnet about a hamburger, with the following results:

Oh, fair and savory burger on my plate

With sesame seeds and meat so juicy sweet

My taste buds sing thy praises, I can’t wait

To sink my teeth into thy heavenly treat

Thou art the king of all fast food delights

With ketchup, lettuce, cheese, and pickles too

Thou satisfy my hunger and my sights

And with each bite, my love for thee renew

No other food can match thy perfect blend

Of flavors, textures, and aromas grand

Thou art a feast for all my senses, friend

And with thy taste, my soul doth truly stand

Oh, hamburger, thou art a gift from heaven

He also offered a number of ways ChatGPT can help his middle school students with their writing.

“ChatGPT can be an excellent resource to teach writing to eighth grade students,” he wrote in an email. “It can provide instant feedback, generate writing prompts, help students improve their vocabulary, model good writing, and encourage collaborative writing. These approaches can help students develop their writing skills, think critically, and express themselves effectively in written form.”

He and many of his colleagues are firm believers that ChatGPT and similar AI writing programs are here to stay, and that can turn out to be a very good thing.

It’s also helpful as a teacher’s aid. Hunt said he uses it to write multiple choice questions for quizzes and tests, to produce lesson plans, to even come up with entertaining jokes and riddles that keep his students engaged in the classroom.

“It will be a tool people can use,” he said. “It does seem like magic, but you’re still going to have to know how to research and write a report, a paper. It’s not going to replace writers. I’m hoping that it can replace bad writers, and good writers will stand out even more. It’s been unleashed on the world, and I’m going to look on the positive side.”

It’s the write stuff, you might even say, hamburger sonnets included.