Earlier this month, as I prepared myself for my first round of college midterms, I found myself faced with three impending blue book exams. I was surprised. Even though I was intimately familiar with this type of exam from high school, three felt like an unprecedented amount. Where were the research papers I was expecting? Why were they getting replaced by these high school-style in-class exams?
Blue books are certainly not new, but they seem to be going through a renaissance as professors across campuses grapple with increasing AI use. This change is part of a much broader trend in colleges across the United States, where professors, after noticing students’ excessive use of AI in take-home writing assignments, have turned to the classic blue book as an anti-AI Hail Mary.
Of course, not all students use generative chatbots. As Visiting Professor in the Film and Media Studies Department, Katie Model noted, “CliffNotes have been around and there were always students that used them or some form of them and there were other students that didn’t.” The “easy way out” has always been there, but perhaps never as accessible and undetectable as AI makes it.
AI’s capabilities as a writer have grown exponentially over the past year alone. Even in creative writing—a field that many thought would remain untouched by AI—ChatGPT and other language models have gotten increasingly good at replicating the voice of a “good” writer.
When these large language AI models came out in 2022, their creative writing capabilities seemed pretty limited. For example, most chatbots appeared incapable of writing free verse poems, but that is no longer the case. Professor Timothy Liu, Adjunct Assistant Professor and poet, gave this example: “You could say: ‘write a poem about a kid eating an ice cream cone at Princeton, a hot day, and the cone falls and the scoop falls off the cone in the style of Rita Dove.’ And what’s interesting is it’s gonna give you a free verse poem in the style of Rita Dove and it actually sounds pretty good.”
The increased capabilities of AI in writing have made sniffing out the fake from the real writers more and more difficult. “As a teacher, if that’s what a student wants to do then there’s nothing I could do to stop them,” Professor Liu explained. “I’m not really that interested in spending a lot of time trying to monitor or police it.” Ultimately, Liu explained, students are cheating themselves of the opportunity for growth and learning.
Beyond cheating, Liu and Model’s remarks reveal even deeper worries about losing originality and personality in writing. Model explained, “ I think apart from AI [there is an emphasis on] clarity and argument, but at the expense of the art.” AI’s writing, Model noticed, is often centered around making the clearest, most concise points possible. Rather than engage with content through unconventional angles, AI tends to focus on creating clear and streamlined arguments. The papers AI produces are—notably only sometimes—technically correct. However, I think most Vassar students will attest, what makes a class interesting is not the homogeneous takeaways from the material but the conflict, confusion and diverse interpretations that inevitably arise when engaging with complex texts.
Of course, this level of engagement with content and writing takes time. The primary reason students reach for generative chatbots is not from lack of interest—though that may sometimes be the case—but lack of time. “ I used to be able to go to meet with every student and go over their papers and I used to require it,” Professor Model shared. “The time isn’t there anymore because of both life and work demands.” It seems the time to invest in writing is not there anymore. This business is not only going to affect how students write and what professors teach in class, but what type of writing we collectively and culturally value. As we prioritize efficiency, we lose the time and space not only to craft but to explore ideas in new ways. We demand efficiency from the media we consume, and it is demanded of us as producers. Though there are exceptions. Model pointed out that long-form content, like podcasts or long-form television, has created spaces where efficiency isn’t necessarily prioritized. Instead, these platforms create environments where discussions wander and meander beyond ‘key takeaways,’ and encourage audiences to engage with content in less streamlined ways.
These explorations are inevitably imperfect and oftentimes not necessarily fruitful or even sensible by nature. It is in these moments of discovery that interesting, new ideas come about. “ What’s always surprising about the arts is most of the art that is produced is mediocre and regurgitated […] that’s sort of the nature of the beast as we learn by exposure and imitation and practice.” Liu continued, “A lot of the work that ends up standing the test of time is this weird stuff that no one had imagined and I think that that is beyond AI.”
Sure, AI can generate decent poetry and essays, but as of now, the “weird stuff” can only be cultivated through genuine engagement. Of course, like Liu pointed out, most ideas may not be successful, but one would hope it’s worth the time to craft those skills.
The outright replacement of all human writing with ChatGPT-generated writing seems far from realistic and apocalyptic, but it raises an interesting question: What writing should we preserve? When we write emails using ChatGPT, that feels fundamentally different than using it to write an essay or even a text message. Where do we draw the line between important processes and unnecessary ones? Moreover, this inevitably leads us to ask: Why do we write? For its efficiency? The space it provides as a place to explore? Personal expression?
There will always be people who care about writing. The craft is not lost, our brains are not going to be replaced by chatbots, but students and teachers will continue to grapple with the effects of AI. For now, the return of the blue book exam will serve as a space to preserve the many meandering, weird and very human mistakes that are becoming more and more scarce.
I’m concerned that what makes Vassar a unique institution, the many take-home assignments that involve the writer’s craft, is being lost and that, say, the 90’s experience is becoming drastically different from the turn of the 21st century. This is a shame.