A Reflection on Teaching Writing in An AI World

Words are important, and the ability to string them together in a manner that makes sense while providing a convincing argument is a vital skill. Our ability to communicate efficiently and well is necessary in the development and expression of our critical thinking skills. I’ve spent the past twenty-five years, or more, teaching college students English composition, focusing primarily on the art of developing well-organized argumentative essays, evaluation of sources, and the implementation of them in support of writers’ positions. Over the years, I’ve found that the instructional challenges have increased, and I am at the point where I often question why I continue to endeavor to pass on these skills. I have rules against using AI programs, but I am certain that the bulk of my students regularly choose to ignore these rules in favor of AI writing their papers for them. This results in my feeling like my job is pointless.

In all fairness, the students’ perspective on using AI to produce their papers is akin to how I felt about using a calculator close to fifty years ago when I was in high school. The calculator could figure out sines and cosines, as well as other somewhat arcane mathematical formulae, and I didn’t see any time when I wouldn’t have one available to figure that out for me, so why bother doing it on my own? At that time, most of my high school math teachers insisted on testing without calculators, but even that started changing due to how common the buggers were. By the end of my education in mathematics, the TI-35 calculator produced by Texas Instruments was a required purchase for any math course, and they currently reside in trash heaps all over the country, long surpassed by superior machines that are far more capable.

But I look at language skills differently than I do mathematics because most of us use words to process thoughts and communicate. Learning to write effectively teaches us to process information, apply logic, take a position, defend it, and share our thoughts with whomsoever reads what we’ve produced. As long as they can read our language, we can communicate with anyone anywhere in the world this way and be understood. Writing forces us to organize our thoughts, and because it’s a recursive process, drafting our work and taking it through revisions, also requires us to analyze how we’ve framed our perspectives so we can hone them until they’re sharp, and polish them until our words shine from the page. Our minds need this type of training, and the practice we get from actively sitting down and writing on a regular basis helps to clarify our thought processes, engages us in wrestling with ideas, and assists in sharpening our mental acuity.

Passing writing assignments off to a computer program does nothing other than furnishing something to turn in for an assignment. People who do this aren’t really learning anything of significance, and are basically cheating themselves out of an education that helps them move forward in life. People often spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on an education, frequently taking years to pay off student loans amassed in the hopes of becoming gainfully employed. To me, the thought of handing off writing assignments to AI programs seems to be a ridiculous waste of monetary resources, as well as an incredible waste of an opportunity to better oneself, and one’s ability to communicate professionally. It reminds me of the old Rodney Dangerfield movie from back in the 1980s, Back to School, where Dangerfield’s character, a rich businessman who decides to go to college late in life, hires people to do his schoolwork for him, and then doesn’t understand why it’s considered unethical, after all, successful businesses thrive on delegation of projects to hirelings while the leadership reaps the credit and the benefits.

I’m in my sixties now, and over my lifetime have witnessed technological advances that have snowballed at an alarming rate. These advances have run the gamut from the absurd to the divine, but have also proven to be problematic in ways that some science fiction writers foresaw years ago. 130 years ago, the horse was a primary form of transportation. The first commercial patent for the light bulb was filed in 1879 by Thomas Edison. We’ve gone from the light bulb to Artificial Intelligence in 147 years, from the light bulb to the moon in 90, from dynamite to the first nuclear bomb in 79 years, and from that point to now, 81 years, to being able to obliterate all life forms on the planet. Most people can’t keep up with that rate of evolution, and many are being left behind as more and more jobs become automated at higher and higher rates.

People using artificial intelligence to write papers for college courses doesn’t equate to nuclear proliferation, of course, but it’s not exactly harmless either. Critical thinking skills are vital to every aspect of our lives, and the more that automation takes over the work force, the more important our abilities to think our way through problems and adapt to change are going to become. The gap between the haves and have nots will only increase given current business models where profit takes precedence over the welfare of the general populace, and the lack of a core education promoting critical thinking skills can only be a detriment to the survival of individuals and families in our rapidly shifting society. I am a firm believer in the importance of learning effective communication skills, and have spent several decades teaching those skills, but am truly disheartened by spending my time grading papers written by machines, not the students who were supposed to learn from the experience.