Opinion AI is forcing teachers to confront an existential question

Editorial Writer|
December 12, 2023 at 5:45 a.m. EST
(Ari Liloan for The Washington Post)
18 min

“Remember what I told you last week? Forget it.”

This is how Marc Watkins starts many a faculty meeting in the University of Mississippi’s department of writing and rhetoric. The self-fashioned AI guru has been tracking the capabilities of the large language models, such as ChatGPT, that are already transforming how his students write and read — in some cases, by doing both for them.