This may be the end of using writing as a benchmark for aptitude and intelligence, Daniel Herman writes. ⁠ ⁠ The work that ChatGPT—an artificial-intelligence program that generates sophisticated text in response to any prompt—can produce right now is better than the large majority of writing seen by your average teacher or professor. Based on his 12 years of experience teaching, Herman writes that American high-school students can be roughly split into three categories. The bottom group is learning to master grammar rules, punctuation, and basic comprehension. The middle group is working on argument and organization within paragraphs and essays. And the third group has the luxury of focusing on things such as tone, rhythm, variety, and mellifluence. The introduction of ChatGPT disrupts these as the building blocks not only of good writing but of writing as a tool. “Perhaps there are reasons for optimism, if you push all this aside,” Herman writes. “Maybe every student is now immediately launched into that third category: The rudiments of writing will be considered a given, and every student will have direct access to the finer aspects of the enterprise.”⁠ ⁠ But the majority of students do not see writing as a worthwhile skill to cultivate, he continues at the link in our bio. “I believe my most essential tasks, as a teacher, are helping my students think critically, disagree respectfully, argue carefully and flexibly, and understand their mind and the world around them. Unconventional, improvisatory, expressive, meta-cognitive writing can be an extraordinary vehicle for those things. But if most contemporary writing pedagogy is necessarily focused on helping students master the basics, what happens when a computer can do it for us?”