When I was a student, I worked at my university’s writing center. In this job, I learned to edit student work, helping first year students edit their first assignments and supporting masters’ students as they edited their thesis. I noticed that students persistently made the same mistakes and struggled to edit their own work.

Although talking in class about ChatGPA made me a little worried for the future of plagiarism, it also inspired me to think of new ways to help students learn editing skills.

When students are assigned essays they are often so exhausted by their topic that by the time they reach the editing stage, they find that they have no energy to read their essay over. With ChatGPA, student can instantly create an essay on any topic they like and spend the majority of their time working on editing the essay.

At this moment, it seems like ChatGPA and other AI content generating software represent the direction that school is moving. And if that is true, then teachers need to radically rethink technology in the classroom. Teachers need to help students work collaboratively with AI, rather than competing with it.

However, the future is far from set in stone. Sometimes, designing curriculum feels like writing science fiction. We are reaching forward with our words, trying to imagine a world that has never existed before.

When I think about curriculum development, I feel torn between preparing students for the future that will come if society follows current trends and the best possible future that I could hope for for my students. I want to believe that if I keep both of these in mind, my students will be prepared for a future somewhere between those two poles.

All of this is to say that although I am a bit of a tech resistant curmudgen who wants to teach her students to start fires in the woods and knit, I suppose that AI is here to stay, and I believe that using ChatGPA to teach editing skills will equip our students for the science fiction future we are writing.