By Schuyler Daffey and Madison Hu
Affirmative:
Professor B sits at his desk in Barnard Hall, the fluorescent luminescence of Milstein his moon. He opens his laptop, hot and fried from a long day of teaching his course titled Modernity and Novel and Mothers, Too.
On the screen are 10 essay submissions from his 15 students.
The deadline was last week. The page count was flexible. He forgets about the five stragglers for now. He keeps what his therapist calls his “thoughts of sorrow” at bay as he clicks on the first submission: Katie, a soft-spoken freshman with a lot to say about juxtaposition and tension and push-and-pulls.
The subject line of the email is sparse. It reads:
essay
The body follows in form.
this is the essay thank you
The attachment is labeled “essay1quillpenn.essay.thisisreal.epub.” Professor B hesitates—could this be a virus?
When he clicks on the attachment, he is only 50 percent sure his computer won’t crash.
The essay opens with a vague promise.
In this essay, this essay will explore many things.
Surely, Katie is capable of a stronger introduction. Surely, because this was sent in three hours after the deadline, qualifying it as the earliest submission in the class, Katie had thought through her piece a little more than average.
But Professor B is missing the full picture. He is unaware, of course, that the night of the deadline, Katie was downtown at a Gray’s Papaya, downing three hotdogs and two milkshakes with the power imbued upon every drunk freshman who manages to get into a club with an impossibly flexible, incredibly fake ID from Maine.
Katie was with her suitemates—those sweet girls—who graciously held her phone as she gobbled up the dogs. Jennifer, the angel she is, was taking selfies with it when an email notification interrupted her flow. She showed it to Katie, who immediately panic-burped and ran straight out of Gray’s Papaya, hyperventilating and half-screaming on Sixth Avenue. She had forgotten about the essay deadline, risking a bad grade for the first time in her life.
She read Professor B’s email and fought through the virtual gates of Duo to skim his essay guidelines on CourseWorks, which he had disseminated three months prior. Write about the modern novel … mothers too … when and where … diverse dynamic experimental …
Outside Gray’s Papaya, Katie got to work in her Notes app. She had been feverishly writing for what felt like 10 minutes when she realized she had simply tacked drunk musings onto a written-on-the-train poem. She resigned to accept that she would just send it anyway; Professor B did say the essay could be experimental.
“Can we go to the club again?” Matt begged from the corner, entertaining a pigeon next to a pile of trash.
“Yessssss!!!!!” her suitemates crooned, like the Furies.
Without a beat, they swept Katie into the nearest club, the apparently famous and super-exclusive-except-for-right-now Break Down Downtown Woo, Yeah, Hey! Club. Her Notes app glitched as splashes of vodka cran landed on her screen. She wiped, then typed, then wiped.
At 3 a.m., Katie was swept into an Uber, and her stomach did not feel good.
“What do I do?????” she wailed in the car, causing an immediate drop in her overall Uber rating by one whole star.
“Here.” Jennifer, ever the angel, took her phone, typed for five minutes, and gave it back. “It’s submitted.”
In the morning, Katie had no recollection of the essay. Or most of the night.
A week later, Professor B, wiping mustard from his beard in his Barnard Hall office, is left with the task of deciphering Katie’s paper.
The answer? Love. Or perhaps hate.
He sighs heavily as he, yet again, marks the sentence with a big red question mark. What was Katie thinking with this? Was she thinking at all?
In conclusion, there is no conclusion. The modern novel is modern and diverse and experimental. It is everything, it is nothing. Today, the novel is also modern, but it is better called contemporary.
“What does this mean??????????” Professor B screams into his head-void.
Contemporary means the present, according to Oxford Languages (Citation 1e42325).
Oh.
Maybe there is a rhyme and reason to this. Maybe Katie was operating on a level that Professor B did not catch on the first read through. Maybe this is actually an inspired piece with inspired things to say.
Thank you for choosing ChatGPT for your auto-generated essay.
Professor B’s thoughts of sorrow are back, and, ignoring his therapist’s advice, he allows them to wash over him.
He throws up a little in his mouth as he gives an obligatory F to the paper. Please, Professor B silently begs, please let the next essay be readable.
Negative:
“Damn ChatGPT,” Professor B bemoans, yearning for the days of chalk blackboards, handwritten essays scrawled in blue fountain pen, and good old honest work. He turns to his next essay, this one submitted three days late by Luke, a Sigma Chi brother who regularly watches soccer highlights in class, one AirPod in at all times. The subject line of Luke’s email is identical to Katie’s. It reads only: essay. Professor B hangs his head ruefully. There is no body text, merely a PDF which sits like a lonely island in the vast emptiness of the email. Fearing the worst, he clicks into the document.
What did the modren novel
Professor B is taken aback. He rereads the title, certain that he has somehow missed something. What did the modren novel? Perhaps this student will offer a deconstructivist take on contemporary literature, he prays. Perhaps Luke is mirroring the breakdown of traditional novel structure in his deconstruction of the title! He rubs his hands together in glee, an ebullient smile forming on his lips: Luke had been focused and listening in class this entire time! He returns to Luke’s essay, crowing with delight and pride in his student.
Modern novels were written from 1900 to 1940. They usualy included themes of society, modernity, and the inner wokrings of the mind.
A cold, creeping sense of dread begins to wash over Professor B. Themes of society? This is not the work of a student who is attuned to the fine detail and expansive psychological themes of the modernist literary tradition. He can barely continue reading through all the typos, but his eyes are pulled inexorably, like a moth to the light, back to the trainwreck.
In Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, the reader experiencs Clarissa Dalloway’s inner mind over the course of onde day.
Like the diligent junior that he is, devoted to his studies and inspired by his fascinating classes and hardworking professors, Luke created a Word document for his essay exactly 27 minutes before the deadline. Posted up on the third floor of Butler, a Celsius in each hand, he readied himself to write an essay teasing out the nuances and contradictions of the modern novel. But he began to realize that there was one small issue: He had not cracked the cover of a single text on the syllabus.
From there, his problems only deepened. About 10 minutes into planning this essay, Luke began to receive a rapid stream of texts from his Brothers:
“Dude, where are u? We cant start shotgunning til u get here”
Followed by: “bro come now. mike found a keg in the basement and now we’re throwing tn. we need you here man”
And ten minutes after that: “CPOME TO THE HIUOSE BROOO. ITS SOOLITICANTEVEN.”
The discovery of the keg was the straw that broke Luke’s back. He could hold off no longer; his body acted as if it had a mind of its own. He was dimly aware of his hands packing his MacBook away, of shoving his books into his backpack. He surveyed his document: an introduction and two solid, mostly coherent paragraphs. He would just force a pledge to finish his essay later, he reasoned; being pledge master had to come with a few perks.
This was how, 30 minutes later, Luke found himself drinking from a keg, the age and origins of its contents unclear, upside down, his feet in the air, while his Brothers bellowed, “SIGMA SIGMA SIGMA,” in a gathered circle around him. Meanwhile, new pledge Josh, baby-faced, barely 17 years old, and four beers in, sat hunched over Luke’s computer in the corner, furiously typing his best approximation of the role of mothers in the modern novel.
Professor B is shocked to discover that the quality of the writing improves somewhat over the course of Luke’s essay.
There is still an abundance of egregious spelling errors, to be sure, but ChatGPT could not have written this. ChatGPT, at least, can spell basic words. It is cold comfort, but comfort nonetheless. He gives it a C-. I need more detail next time!, he urges in the CourseWorks comments section, along with an extensive analysis of Luke’s essay, at which he is certain that Luke will never look.
Professor B screams a single sound of anguish into the night. It comes from deep within him, a hoarse, half-feral noise articulating his frustrations at the disarray of higher education, the calling to which he has devoted his life’s work now being trampled on by his students and their abject preference of alcohol to Faulkner. His scream is swallowed into the library’s cavernous depths as if he had never uttered the sound at all. With a leaden sigh of defeat and resignation, Professor B opens his next essay submission …
Hello! I think this Essay is not AI because this is one of the tutorials on how to write essays and the professor's feelings when he had to write this essay. His scream was swallowed geometry dash deadlocked into the depths of the library as if he had never uttered that sound.