I’ve never seen a chatbot, but I’ll take the word of reliable newspaper coverage and accept the fact that a computer program can generate a text on “The Wonders of Buffalo” that is more professional than most first-year university composition essays.

This is no more surprising than my assumption that fewer than 1% of such students could define, say, the word “wisdom” more accurately than Webster’s Dictionary. 

In fact, we (I taught Freshman Comp for years) encourage students to look up words so they will use them precisely, and we expect advanced students of literature to research established scholarship in the process of working up an analysis with the thumbprint of the student-author.

I wouldn’t warn students about the dire consequences of ChatBot plagiarism, though I would point out that most teachers could root out “cheating” by having an office-visit conversation about the contents of a suspect essay: “Good work, Chatterton, but please tell me a little more about Robert Frost’s debt to Virgil’s Eclogues.”

Instead, I would begin such a writing course with this assignment: “Write a 300-word essay about the impact of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address (about the same length).”

Now: Ask your chosen chatbot (however this works) to generate an essay on the same topic. Fully 90% of first-year students wouldn’t write their first submission with as much clarity and coherence as the chatbot “author.”

Now ask the student to “learn” from the invisible author by identifying where and how the software-mind improved upon the student text.

Keep repeating this exercise (taking this medicine) for a semester. I predict that the student will have discovered by the end of the term where his/her/their originality lies.

I would point out all along that the aim of the course — one they would value, I hope — was to “find your own voice,” not to be a ventriloquist’s dummy. I would point out as well that all of the authors they admire started out by learning from and imitating an established writer until they discovered and valued the difference: “I am Hemingway, Mark Twain.”

Students always will find ways to be beat the system. All one can do is to point out that living students will make meaningful lives, not the system!

Howard R. Wolf is the co-author with Roger J. Porter (Reed College) of “The Voice Within: Reading and Writing Autobiography.” He is emeritus professor in the Department of English (SUNY-Buffalo) and a graduate of Amherst College. He lives in Amherst, New York.

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