Technology

You can still fake it. Have AI write the essay, you "write" a first draft and simulate edits here and there. You can also prompt AI to writer a first, second, and third draft and detail changes. Then you manually make them over time. Turn it in.

Look, this is a chance for teaching and grading to change. It needs to as the traditional methods which were failing from budget cuts, overuse of shit tools, etc, weren't working. Put learning, not evaluation, in the classroom and you can avoid AI abuse. I am an N of 1, but I'm telling you there are teachers out there who are amazing because they approach teaching without regurgitation and grade based progress. AI thrives at both.

Go grab Frier, read pedagogy of the oppressed, and then start researching contract grading.

HEY HEY that is different ok!

I feel like the idea that art is "remixing" is a bit of an imprecise explanation that often leads people to think that when artists create similar works they're basing the one on the other.

Take music as an example. Let's say you've got a standard 6-string guitar fretted for 12 tone even temperament. If you take one string and explore all the relationships between the notes, you're going to independently discover things about intervals, scales, and modes without necessarily learning any of the terminology, theory, or history associated with any particular cultural context. Your ear will show you that a major scale sounds one way and a minor scale sounds another without going into it knowing which is which. You'll notice that when you play 0, 2, 4, 5 it sounds uplifting, and when you play 0, 2, 3, 5 it can sound a little more sorrowful.

When you discover a double harmonic scale, it's going to naturally have elements that sound similar to the Mayamalavagowla raga and the Bhairav raga even if you have never heard a single note of Indian music. You didn't have to conjure up these elements to try to sound like music based on these ragas, because the elements are preexisting. You could play these scales on the other side of the galaxy with no knowledge of Earth and the mathematical relationships at play between the frequencies would remain.

The same is true of melodies within a scale. The intervals of notes push and pull in different directions and give a feeling of wanting to land somewhere while taking a route that feels right. If you play around with an E minor scale long enough, you're probably going to eventually play the first five notes in a way that sounds a lot like the chorus from "I Was Made For Lovin' You" just by playing around with runs. It doesn't matter if you've never heard the song or aren't aware of KISS, it's right there on the fretboard. Assuming that those notes coming out of your strings is specifically tied to one song or one band ignores the fact that whoever wrote that song also had to discover that arrangement of preexisting intervals on a preexisting scale. In this particular case it's just a run back and forth from 1-5, pretty simple. That also extends to other relationships between intervals, because the notes come with weight and an accompanying feeling that pushes them toward some sort of outcome.

I think for people who don't play an instrument, this isn't always intuitive. Part of the same hump that can make it difficult for someone to get into music in the first place can contribute to this outlook too. If they think they have to plan every note and aren't aware of the process of playing by feeling, it seems calculated rather than organic. You certainly can calculate every step, but playing music doesn't require it and neither do many other forms of art.

Obviously we also learn from the art around us, so it's not as though we're learning in a total vacuum. Part of why a note feels like it makes sense to go in a direction is because of learned context. Take Nirvana, for example. If you grew up on Nirvana, it may feel more obvious to include what might otherwise have been counterintuitive intervals that someone who's never listened to anything but 18th century Western European music might find jarring. Or more generally, if you are used to a musical tradition that's informed by blues somewhere in its history, you're probably more likely to have a positive visceral reaction to the use of blue notes in the right context.

But that still doesn't necessarily mean just xeroxing pieces of genres and slapping them together. It informs what you feel about your organic exploration of music. There may be elements that are explicitly and intentionally borrowed, but I don't think that's the primary reason we see these similarities.

Similarities exist because creating art is an organic process informed by physical law, our bodies, and the tools we use, and because the process is taking place on the same planet and often in the same or similar contexts as other pieces of art.

How would that test work more than once per student though

In my experience that is in fact more of a MS Word feature (and very inconsistent at it) than a general word processor feature. But maybe I'm underestimating the impact on "average texts" simply because my use of MS products is far below average.

Which is great for one application, but two spaces after each period would be hell to edit down to AP Style.

I mean, Ctrl+H and switching two spaces to one is easily doable, but that's not where I want to start the editing process.

Absolutely lol