A professor at Grambling State University in Louisiana says he will fail any student caught using AI. “I get paid the same whether I pass you or fail you,” he said.
“I tell students that ChatGPT is disallowed from their writing process, that I can immediately tell when ChatGPT has been used, and that I will fail the student on this assignment if it is used,” theatre professor Neal Hebert told the New Yorker in a roundup of instructor testimonials on AI’s impact on their profession.
Hebert added that he would even “potentially” fail a student “for the entire course, if we go through a formal appeals process.”
“I tell my theatre majors, ‘I get paid the same whether I pass you or fail you,’” the professor continued. “‘But what you’ve just done is told me and everyone else in our department that you are so lazy you would rather outsource your collaboration to an app than risk being an artist.’”
“I’ve stopped being a collaborator in these intro courses and started being a plagiarism cop, and I do resent that a bit,” Hebert lamented. “I wanted to be the kind of professor my professors were for me.”
Not all professors, however, expressed the same sentiments to the magazine.
University of Toronto Scarborough sociology professor Daniel Silver told the New Yorker, “AI has fundamentally changed how I teach, and it demands basic reflection about what we are trying to accomplish.”
Silver added that he spent a lot of time this school year thinking up new assignments that involve using the technology in more creative ways.
“Beyond that, students still would use AI in a thoughtless way, as a replacement for their thought and judgment,” Silver wrote in his testimonial. “So I made a point to just call them on it, and make them meet with me personally.”
The professor explained that when this happens, he speaks with the student, gives them a zero, then offers them a chance to redo it.
“They usually improved, but not always,” Silver said. To drive the point home, he would show them AI-generated assignments to demonstrate how the “they all kind of look the same.”
Hebert does not concur, telling the magazine that any remaining positive sentiment he may have had was destroyed upon reading his students’ papers on Fences, a Pulitzer-winning 1985 play by August Wilson.
“Out of forty students, the vast majority chose similar words, phrasing, and concepts, and most papers were written in that inimitable ChatGPT style: ‘This isn’t a simple story about injustice — it’s a clarion call for a positive understanding of justice,’” he said.
Hebert is trying to fight back against AI by giving his students assignments on plays too obscure for AI chatbots to know about.
“If ChatGPT is used on these assignments now, it hallucinates characters, plotlines,” the professor told the New Yorker. “It just makes shit up, since it has nothing to go on.”
Nonetheless, this tactic hasn’t completely stopped cheating via AI, Hebert revealed, adding that the matter has caused him to have nightmares of what the technology’s long-term implications for theater will be if students “can’t be bothered to read and think about the plays they are performing in.”
“Can you imagine AI Performing Arts Slop? The theatrical equivalent of the images ChatGPT and its competitors spit out, soulless and inert, arriving on stage stillborn?” he asked. “I can.”
Alana Mastrangelo is a reporter for Breitbart News. You can follow her on Facebook and X at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.