As part of the class's final portfolio, students were required to write a 3-4 page review of the poetry collection by John Murillo, winner of the 2021 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award for his powerful explorations of identity, desire and violence in the modern world. At the end of the spring semester, while trying to grade final projects to be submitted to the registrar's online platform, I came across a student's review that scared me. It was problematic and disappointing, yet more than that — frightening. The student had not read the poetry collection. The premise of their entire review was based on the state of contemporary American poetry beginning in the 1950s, which was inaccurate and had nothing to do with the collection at all. The student didn't even care to investigate what the three Ks meant in Murillo's book title.
It was then I realized I was looking at my first AI-generated paper, likely written by ChatGPT. The student had plagiarized to my eye, submitting their final portfolio with supreme confidence that I had little to no intelligence, that I would not notice the subtle nor the blatant imperfections. Upon further investigation, all the flash fiction and poetry appeared to have been AI-generated. My emotions went from anger to disappointment to sadness to reading between the tea leaves — or, as they say in my home state of Alabama, I could peep through mud and see dry land. I understood, at that moment in time, that I was staring at the reordering of the ordered order and possibly my own death as a writer, one who is committed to independent thinking and uses creativity and language to deconstruct the intricate ills of society, but also the joys and humanism of everyday life.
