I think that this line from Mollick is illuminating, but not in a good way: "(I have AI check all of my writing and roleplay different reader perspectives to see if I missed something important)"
My experience as a writer is that I always miss something important. That's just the nature of the beast - there's no way to communicate everything, and you always think of other things that you could have said after the fact. AI's creation of what appears on the surface to be "perfect" prose is engaging with people's perfectionism in unhealthy ways, particularly students who struggle with writing, are trying to create an impressive academic resume, etc.
The Winthrop op-ed is also concerning - she writes that "the linguistic coverup worked; post-ChatGPT essays were rated as more “creative” by human judges, even if the substance of the essays trod familiar territory." So we appear to be heading towards a world in which writers of all sorts see AI as a tool that can make their writing "more perfect" when actually it's making writing bland and devoid of meaning.
It’s very much a question about what we value when we look at and judge writing. My biases are so far towards the uniquely human that the AI writing that Mollick finds frustrating barely registers for me, like I can’t even take it in.
The challenge for school is that we’ve already set up a system where those surface-level indicators of “perfection” stand in for substance. We have to hold the line on valuing text that says something.
Agreed. What worries me, in regards to the Winthrop quotation above, is that a lot of people are easily taken in by the surface level "perfection" of AI writing because they've taken the bad lessons from their days in school and held onto them. I read some AI slop and my immediate reaction is "what in the holy hell is this nonsense?" but that doesn't seem to be everyone's default position - the Granta story winner being another good example.
As a writer and a high school English teacher of 20 years, I'm torn. If we do not get in the trenches with our students with AI in the room, we lose the opportunity to teach them its limitations. We punted social media outside the classroom and lost the chance to teach to prevent the hacking of our students' attention and attachment systems. I don't disagree with a lot of what you are saying, but I'm putting my labor behind trying to figure out how to build my students' self-regulation and awareness. I need to be in relationships with my students so that they can write when it counts and we need to move beyond transactional spaces in education so that engagement increases making it count more. AND we need to show them how some writing is transactional and needs to be efficient with AI co-drafting.
As someone who has both taught writing, written “creatively” and “personally,” and spent a good number of years in private industry producing transactional texts, I agree that the capacity to deploy this technology in ways that more efficiently fulfills the transaction while maintaining accuracy and quality will be useful and important.
But I also believe a couple of other things. 1. Even much of the writing we think of as transactional benefits from not treating it outright that way. One of the things that made me good at the various genres of business and technical writing I engaged in was to see past the transaction and apply a fuller view of the rhetorical situation.
The ability to manage the technology in transactional situations is absolutely dependent on developing as deep and wide a writing practice as possible. I really believe that we must teach writing before we start letting students loose with some kind of co-creation. Steven Rosenbaum is the object example of someone who should’ve been able to manage these tensions, but clearly cannot.
We can teach students about AI without inviting it into co-creation spaces. There’s also ways to use AI without risking the kind of problems that Rosenbaum and Winthrop discuss.
I’m not saying we have to abolish any use or mention of the tech in the classroom, and I am 100% on board with the experimenting many are doing, but I think we have a building sense of where the boundaries should be.
This really is the worst use case gen AI: writing prose, especially academic prose! The fake citations alone are meaning shaped attention vampires that force the reader to cognitively decode content that sounds smart but is literally meaningless!
Great piece…The thing that hasn’t been mentioned here (unless I missed it) is that too many people simply can’t tell the difference between writing that is accomplished and alive, and writing that is not. I’m not talking about people here on Substack but among the general public the differences that we see and feel so keenly are not much of a thing.
Given that “AI slop” is now the term of art most people recognize , I’d say that the public is much less behind the curve than one would believe while engaged in the AI debate.
But thank you, you are right. And keep up the amazing work.
I see it as a corruption of the natural use and development of language and I think the effects on cognitive and social development are going to be severe
As an English teacher (equivalent of high school) I agree thoroughly. As the months go by, it becomes all the clearer that the technology should be excluded from the - admittedly limited - arena of teenagers learning to write, read and think. It can be fruitfully deployed elsewhere.
“Engagement” is yet another buzzword that places the burden on teachers to make everything increasingly and endlessly “engaging.” It doesn’t actually mean anything. I would argue that the crisis is one of *caring,* much of which has to be modeled at home. Yet every day I have at least one kid blow off learning by telling me with outsized pride, “My parents don’t care,” and then they keep doing whatever they want.
I agree that “engagement” can be reduced to a buzzword and that the attitudes towards school and learning that are modeled at home and in society can create a dynamic where it is near impossible to get a student interested in doing anything, but we don’t have to accept the buzzword definition, and there is a long and deep history of research and inquiry into what can help get students invested in their own learning.
None of it is easy, but there are specific, previously proven things that can be done. Some of this is about redesigning what students are asked to do, but as I write extensively in an earlier book (Why They Can’t Write) the structural factors are often dispositive. The people pushing AI as a solution want to dodge the responsibility for dealing with those structural factors.
“If the only way for me to not end up with a mistake ever again is to literally stop using AI, that’s just not realistic."
...said the clown who made a mistake using AI. Oof.
I'm not against the use of AI for brainstorming, or even editing. But I'm firmly against generative AI writing unless AI is listed as the author. Even then, I hate it, but at least the person who used it was honest.
It’s contradiction all the way down, let’s face the illusions of symbols head-on. Language was always going to end in slop: it’s built from the arbitrary. It’s slop to begin with. We knew this at Aristotle and misread The Poetics. He’s describing an addiction, storytellers are mistaking them as valid forms.
Mollick’s just trapped now in a double pandora’s box, one at metaphors/symbols some 100K+ years ago and just arriving AI.
Really appreciate you writing this. Generative AI produces worse results while simultaneously making people more dependent on it and bizarrely convinced they’re receiving some benefit.
AI, as a concentrate of the internet, is an instrument for Gleichschaltung. Art is the canary, and if it suffocates, it means, there is no more fresh oxygen being produced. We must try to give all those young folks who love to express themselves a base salary (See Irelands Artist Programme) or find a way for them to earn a living from it. Art needs to be fed, or it starves, and we end up in Pink Floyd’s The Wall.
AI, as a concentrate of the internet, is an instrument for Gleichschaltung. Art is the canary, and if it suffocates, it means, there is no more fresh oxygen being produced. We must try to give all those young folks who love to express themselves a base salary (See Irelands Artist Programme) or find a way for them to earn a living from it. Art needs to be fed, or it starves, and we end up in Pink Floyd’s The Wall.
I think that this line from Mollick is illuminating, but not in a good way: "(I have AI check all of my writing and roleplay different reader perspectives to see if I missed something important)"
My experience as a writer is that I always miss something important. That's just the nature of the beast - there's no way to communicate everything, and you always think of other things that you could have said after the fact. AI's creation of what appears on the surface to be "perfect" prose is engaging with people's perfectionism in unhealthy ways, particularly students who struggle with writing, are trying to create an impressive academic resume, etc.
The Winthrop op-ed is also concerning - she writes that "the linguistic coverup worked; post-ChatGPT essays were rated as more “creative” by human judges, even if the substance of the essays trod familiar territory." So we appear to be heading towards a world in which writers of all sorts see AI as a tool that can make their writing "more perfect" when actually it's making writing bland and devoid of meaning.
It’s very much a question about what we value when we look at and judge writing. My biases are so far towards the uniquely human that the AI writing that Mollick finds frustrating barely registers for me, like I can’t even take it in.
The challenge for school is that we’ve already set up a system where those surface-level indicators of “perfection” stand in for substance. We have to hold the line on valuing text that says something.
Agreed. What worries me, in regards to the Winthrop quotation above, is that a lot of people are easily taken in by the surface level "perfection" of AI writing because they've taken the bad lessons from their days in school and held onto them. I read some AI slop and my immediate reaction is "what in the holy hell is this nonsense?" but that doesn't seem to be everyone's default position - the Granta story winner being another good example.
As a writer and a high school English teacher of 20 years, I'm torn. If we do not get in the trenches with our students with AI in the room, we lose the opportunity to teach them its limitations. We punted social media outside the classroom and lost the chance to teach to prevent the hacking of our students' attention and attachment systems. I don't disagree with a lot of what you are saying, but I'm putting my labor behind trying to figure out how to build my students' self-regulation and awareness. I need to be in relationships with my students so that they can write when it counts and we need to move beyond transactional spaces in education so that engagement increases making it count more. AND we need to show them how some writing is transactional and needs to be efficient with AI co-drafting.
As someone who has both taught writing, written “creatively” and “personally,” and spent a good number of years in private industry producing transactional texts, I agree that the capacity to deploy this technology in ways that more efficiently fulfills the transaction while maintaining accuracy and quality will be useful and important.
But I also believe a couple of other things. 1. Even much of the writing we think of as transactional benefits from not treating it outright that way. One of the things that made me good at the various genres of business and technical writing I engaged in was to see past the transaction and apply a fuller view of the rhetorical situation.
The ability to manage the technology in transactional situations is absolutely dependent on developing as deep and wide a writing practice as possible. I really believe that we must teach writing before we start letting students loose with some kind of co-creation. Steven Rosenbaum is the object example of someone who should’ve been able to manage these tensions, but clearly cannot.
We can teach students about AI without inviting it into co-creation spaces. There’s also ways to use AI without risking the kind of problems that Rosenbaum and Winthrop discuss.
I’m not saying we have to abolish any use or mention of the tech in the classroom, and I am 100% on board with the experimenting many are doing, but I think we have a building sense of where the boundaries should be.
I appreciate your thoughtfulness in this. The social media connection is a good one.
This really is the worst use case gen AI: writing prose, especially academic prose! The fake citations alone are meaning shaped attention vampires that force the reader to cognitively decode content that sounds smart but is literally meaningless!
Great piece…The thing that hasn’t been mentioned here (unless I missed it) is that too many people simply can’t tell the difference between writing that is accomplished and alive, and writing that is not. I’m not talking about people here on Substack but among the general public the differences that we see and feel so keenly are not much of a thing.
Given that “AI slop” is now the term of art most people recognize , I’d say that the public is much less behind the curve than one would believe while engaged in the AI debate.
But thank you, you are right. And keep up the amazing work.
I see it as a corruption of the natural use and development of language and I think the effects on cognitive and social development are going to be severe
As an English teacher (equivalent of high school) I agree thoroughly. As the months go by, it becomes all the clearer that the technology should be excluded from the - admittedly limited - arena of teenagers learning to write, read and think. It can be fruitfully deployed elsewhere.
“Engagement” is yet another buzzword that places the burden on teachers to make everything increasingly and endlessly “engaging.” It doesn’t actually mean anything. I would argue that the crisis is one of *caring,* much of which has to be modeled at home. Yet every day I have at least one kid blow off learning by telling me with outsized pride, “My parents don’t care,” and then they keep doing whatever they want.
I agree that “engagement” can be reduced to a buzzword and that the attitudes towards school and learning that are modeled at home and in society can create a dynamic where it is near impossible to get a student interested in doing anything, but we don’t have to accept the buzzword definition, and there is a long and deep history of research and inquiry into what can help get students invested in their own learning.
None of it is easy, but there are specific, previously proven things that can be done. Some of this is about redesigning what students are asked to do, but as I write extensively in an earlier book (Why They Can’t Write) the structural factors are often dispositive. The people pushing AI as a solution want to dodge the responsibility for dealing with those structural factors.
“If the only way for me to not end up with a mistake ever again is to literally stop using AI, that’s just not realistic."
...said the clown who made a mistake using AI. Oof.
I'm not against the use of AI for brainstorming, or even editing. But I'm firmly against generative AI writing unless AI is listed as the author. Even then, I hate it, but at least the person who used it was honest.
It’s contradiction all the way down, let’s face the illusions of symbols head-on. Language was always going to end in slop: it’s built from the arbitrary. It’s slop to begin with. We knew this at Aristotle and misread The Poetics. He’s describing an addiction, storytellers are mistaking them as valid forms.
Mollick’s just trapped now in a double pandora’s box, one at metaphors/symbols some 100K+ years ago and just arriving AI.
Face that music.
Really appreciate you writing this. Generative AI produces worse results while simultaneously making people more dependent on it and bizarrely convinced they’re receiving some benefit.
AI, as a concentrate of the internet, is an instrument for Gleichschaltung. Art is the canary, and if it suffocates, it means, there is no more fresh oxygen being produced. We must try to give all those young folks who love to express themselves a base salary (See Irelands Artist Programme) or find a way for them to earn a living from it. Art needs to be fed, or it starves, and we end up in Pink Floyd’s The Wall.
AI, as a concentrate of the internet, is an instrument for Gleichschaltung. Art is the canary, and if it suffocates, it means, there is no more fresh oxygen being produced. We must try to give all those young folks who love to express themselves a base salary (See Irelands Artist Programme) or find a way for them to earn a living from it. Art needs to be fed, or it starves, and we end up in Pink Floyd’s The Wall.