A college professor grades 95 student essays. Then writes this:

"Miraculously, in the last year, mistakes of spelling and grammar have mostly disappeared—poof!—revealing sparkling error-free prose, even from students who speak English as a second or third language. The writing is getting better.

"The ideas are getting worse.

"There’s a new genre of essay that other academics reading this will instantly recognize, a clumsy collaboration between students and Silicon Valley. I call it glittering sludge.

"At the same time, in a totally unrelated development, some students have adopted a bold academic strategy: citing books and articles that do not exist.

"(In one particularly amusing example, a student cited me in an essay, drawing from my book, Fluke. The only problem: the alleged author of the cited text in the bibliography was not listed as Brian Klaas, but one “Benjamin Fluke.” Right title, wrong author, wrong publisher, wrong year. Well played, ChatGPT).

"The death of the student essay is not merely an academic concern. It is not just a problem for young people hoping to get good grades, nor is it only relegated to the realm of my fellow elbow-patched nerds. Instead, the rapidly improving ability to impressively mimic human language poses an existential threat to traditional methods of crafting smarter minds—which thereby challenges the future of human cognition."

Professor Brian Klass