ChatGPT and World History Essays

An Assignment and its Insights into the Coloniality of Generative AI

Abstract

This article describes an assignment used in a 100-level college world history class that requires students to produce history essays using ChatGPT and then annotate and assess those essays according to how well they analyze topics covered in the course. The article first demonstrates how the assignment has proved a useful tool in promoting student learning objectives and assessing their mastery of course content. The second section of the article offers quantitative analysis of the content of the 57 ChatGPT essays submitted by students in the spring semester of 2023. That data demonstrates that ChatGPT produces history essays with a strong Eurocentric and Anglocentric bias. This essay thus has two conclusions: first, that ChatGPT can productively be used in a college history course to encourage student learning and critical thinking. Second, that it is imperative for educators to impart to our students the significant limitations of generative AI’s knowledge-production abilities, as algorithms trained on large language models (LLMs) reproduce historic inequalities.