As we get deeper and deeper into a life with generative AI, I’m finding it increasingly hard to keep up.
For instance, there’s the apparent whiplash happening with college professors: At first fearful that ChatGPT spelled the “end of the essay” (which it still may), professors have realized that ChatGPT can help them with their writing chores, too.
As Ian Bogost details in The Atlantic, this includes writing reference letters for students. These letters, you can imagine, are all pretty much the same document over and over again. Why not have AI help you out?
Bogost spoke to one professor who is leveraging ChatGPT in a different way. If everyone is jumping onto the ChatGPT bandwagon for boring but important writing like reference letters, doesn’t that mean there’s an opportunity to subvert the reader’s expectations?
“A dirty secret of academe is that most professors have a cache of letters separated into different categories,” says Matt Huculak, another AI-using academic and the head of advanced research services at the University of Victoria libraries. They’ll typically have folders full of excellent, good, and average ones, which can be adjusted and repurposed as appropriate. But Huculak wondered if AI might help break that chain, especially for top students. So he asked ChatGPT to write an “excellent” reference letter, and then, instead of using it as a template, he treated it as an enemy. He opened the ChatGPT output in one window and tried to compose the very opposite of what he saw: an anti-formulaic recommendation letter. “What I wrote ended up feeling like the most ‘human’ and heartfelt letter I’ve written in a long time,” he told me. The student won a prestigious scholarship at Cambridge.
Now that success is anecdotal, of course, but I do think that the story points to an emerging opportunity: Good writing—and good content—may have a better chance of standing out where everyone uses AI, so long as you approach the standard “boilerplate” as the “enemy.”
I suspect that in my industry—where “boilerplate” content is everywhere, and we know it—that this new strategy could prove a powerful one.
Taylor Coe 