Teachers say AI makes take-home writing pointless

Estonian language teachers say it is no longer practical to assign students writing tasks to complete at home because of uncertainty over authorship, ERR reported. The issue was discussed at the Literature Street Festival by Kirsi Rannaste of Viimsi Gymnasium, Anu Kell of Gustav Adolf Gymnasium and Tallinn Secondary School of Science, and writer and teacher Jürgen Rooste of Tabasalu Gymnasium. The discussion was moderated by Kristi Helme, editor-in-chief of Õpetajate Leht.

Rannaste said that over the past two years she had increasingly found herself wondering who had written the texts submitted by students.

“Is it the student’s text, an artificial intelligence text, or something in between?” she said, adding that the issue had suddenly entered the classroom.

Kell said artificial intelligence was still exceptionally poor at Estonian-language texts and grammar, making AI-generated work relatively easy to recognise. However, she said she had stopped assigning work to be completed at home and instead had students write in class under her supervision.

“There is no point exhausting yourself by playing detective,” Kell said. She added that AI made particularly serious mistakes in assignments about Estonian writers and books, producing claims that no ordinary student would make. In her view, teaching critical thinking was now especially important.

Rooste agreed that there was little point in asking students to do writing tasks at home. He said that although students already faced what was considered an extremely heavy homework load, he had found that many did not read short prose texts or poems assigned for home study. As a result, the texts also had to be read in class before they could be discussed.

Rooste said his lessons lasted 75 minutes, which gave him some room to adapt, but added that there was “almost no point” in assigning homework, and certainly no point in requiring students to write at home.

He also questioned why artificial intelligence had been adopted so quickly. Rooste warned that if students continued writing at home with AI, they might eventually train it to produce work at a convincing level. Kell recalled one case in which she suspected a student’s work had been produced with AI, only to be told that the student had written it independently. She acknowledged that AI was developing and that it might no longer be possible to identify its use in every case.