During my freshman year, my English teacher assigned my class to write an extra chapter for the novel, The House on Mango Street. To align my writing with the book’s, I copied its style of sentence fragments and very few commas. The sentences I wrote were grammatically incorrect, but I talked to my teacher, and she let me bend grammar rules as a stylistic choice.
I was thinking about my House on Mango Street assignment as I read GDS’ updated AI policy, which allows teachers to use AI to draft student feedback. I was upset because of one particular worry: authenticity.
The policy tells teachers that AI “output must always reflect your personal professional judgment and you must take full responsibility for the final words” but does not clearly explain how a teacher may use AI to draft feedback.
AI has never, and will never, experience the human feeling of being moved by a beautiful piece of writing or detailed analysis. No matter how much the technology is trained on human data reactions, AI cannot replace the feedback that a teacher can give.
Let’s say my teacher had used AI to grade my English 9 assignment. She may have generated a draft paragraph of feedback for each student in my class. For my submission, my teacher may have told the AI that I was allowed to use sentence fragments. So the AI may have just looked past the sentence fragments because it knew they were allowed.
Here is what actually happened: My teacher told me her genuine reaction to my incorrect grammar. She explained that my sentence fragments worked stylistically and improved my writing given that a child narrated the story. She looked at the artistic side of my choice and did not pass over the sentences just because she had originally approved of the ungrammatical style.
No two students write in the exact same style with the same voice, which is especially relevant for creative storytelling. From my experience, AI feedback on writing seems to value content that is flat and overly uniform.
Over the summer, I wrote a short story for a creative writing program, and after I turned the assignment in, I was curious about what an AI would think should be improved. So I asked ChatGPT to give me advice. The AI’s feedback was disappointingly bland. I had intentionally written certain sentences to sound like a nursery rhyme because my character was a young girl. The AI criticized the rhyming sentence structure and fixed it to sound standard.
While a well-meaning teacher may start using AI to loosely help them draft feedback that they finalize themselves, they eventually may rely on the technology. As a teacher depends more on AI, their engagement with students becomes less and less authentic.
The AI usage guidebook for GDS employees encourages teachers to consider how their use of AI “implicitly teaches [their] students about what it means to think, create, and be human.”
Without using AI to generate feedback, teachers tell their students their genuine and original reactions to their writing. Our teachers have years of experience and have spent lots of time seeing us in class and reading our works. If they use AI, they would just be adjusting what a machine tells them to say.