Writing Still Matters
Like most educators, I am alarmed by the widespread use of AI because I naturally view the art of writing as an essential skill that must be practiced and honed. I’ve seen how defending a thesis statement leads to a deeper understanding, sharpens thinking, and fosters creativity.
If students are just cutting and pasting from AI, how will they learn to outline, identify an argument, and edit with care and attention?
They won’t.
But aren’t there a lot of skills we once valued that we no longer care about? Horsemanship, penmanship, and needlepoint were once deeply respected because no machine could do the task as well as a human. Until it could. These once essential skills are now quirky hobbies.
As hard as it is for me to accept, the fact that writing has historically been valued doesn’t guarantee it will continue to be valued. Technology and culture constantly shift our priorities.
But there is good news for the art of writing!! Allow me to shamelessly cut and paste from this New York Times article:
This is what researchers at M.I.T. recently found when they tested how A.I. affected writing skills… Those who wrote with ChatGPT from the beginning exhibited the worst writing quality and motivation; and as shown from brain activity measurements, parts of their brain associated with learning were less active. They struggled to revise their writing because it was never theirs to begin with. Participants who drafted their work unaided performed best. Given that even well-educated university students are at risk, we should be even more worried about children who have yet to fully develop their thinking skills.
Learning is hard. Seventh-grade English teachers don’t instruct their students in the art of essay writing in hopes that they’ll create high art. Rather, students learn to organize their thoughts, evaluate evidence, form an argument and articulate a thesis by writing the essay. When A.I. helps students short-circuit this process, critical thinking skills may fail to develop. In the words of one student participating in research for the Brookings Global Task Force on AI in Education, “If you are letting someone else do the work for you, you are not learning.” Other research not yet peer reviewed suggests that frequent cognitive offloading to digital devices may account for the recent decline in student I.Q. levels.
We would be silly to insist on writing by hand or riding around on a horse when computers and cars are available to us. So here is me being practical about AI. It’s really good at syntax. It can take messy thoughts and create cogent sentences. That’s a big deal. It can make terrific lists. I love that. It’s also a handy thesaurus.
The good news for scribophiles like me is that AI is bad at what really matters, including
generating original ideas. By design, it is derivative.
concision. AI is super wordy and repetitive.
authenticity. AI is also painfully cliché and cringe.
critical thinking. AI just reframes existing material.
specificity and detail. AI is a generalist. It can’t produce vivid and memorable examples.
It’s so bad at college personal essays (read more here), it’s laughable.
So for now, the best argument against using AI for anything more than a list is that it’s just not very good. Let’s help students understand that using AI will make their papers (and their brains) worse. At least for now.
