I’ve been asked, in various roles1, to give my opinion on the challenges posed by Large Language Models (LLMs)2, also known as “stochastic parrots” (Bender, Gebru, McMillan-Major, & Shmitchell, 2021), for assessing academic writing assignments. A concern seems to be that students legitimately can use these systems and that then we would be unable to assess their ability to write essays.

My opinion, in brief, is that LLMs cannot legitimately be used to write academic essays.