You are more polite about this than I am. Using AI is complying in advance and showing willingness to outsource your ability to think and communicate to our tech bro overlords. Basically, it is for fascist, extractive capitalist losers.
(I am married to an English teacher so I have to hear EVERY SINGLE DAY about how much the kids use it and I am terrified that we are raising a generation of people with very little ability to think critically because the adults haven't bothered to figure out how to use the new shiny thing responsibly, and we've just made it the water that these kids swim in.)
I am so, so sorry to every single educator right now. And, for them, maybe I need to write another one that leans more into the rage than just the plaintiveness! I'm so sad for everybody-- we've been convinced that all this (the actual living and trying) isn't worth it.
I’m glad Garrett linked to the MIT study in this piece. I’m also an educator for graduate level classes that involve a lot of coding and I’ve had students who are clearly struggling turn in assignments that are way beyond what we’ve even covered and when confronted (gently), they still insisted it was their work. I brought this up to my therapist because aside from it feeling like a true insult to me that they were trying to gaslight me in believing that this was their work, I feel like I failed them in making them comfortable enough to approach me about their struggles, as opposed to just turning to AI. It’s a weird space to navigate for sure.
My grandmother passed away this week, and I felt compelled to write her obituary. It was therapeutic and a labor of love to try to capture the life of someone who meant so much to so many. In reviewing it, one of my aunts said she was glad I’d written it because she was just going to use ChatGPT. Her response was inconceivable to me. Let a robot remember our matriarch? By simply putting in dates and names of relatives? No thank you.
First off, Allison, sending so much love to your family. Reading this (and I had the same reaction you did, of course), it made me think about how much we've been made to doubt ourselves. I could be totally off base, but a loved one who turns to Chat GPT in a moment of grief strikes me as somebody who feels like, for whatever reason, that what they have to offer their family and community isn't enough. And that's tragic!
Thank you for writing your grandmother's obituary.
My grandmother died when my parents were in their 20’s. My grandfather brought in a rabbi to conduct her funeral. But the rabbi knew nothing about my grandmother, and it showed. My father was so enraged that he expelled that clueless rabbi from the funeral.
My interpretation of this story, which happened long before I was born, is that this was something that made my mother love my father even more.
"I will choose anything you create— out of love, out of hope, out of sadness, out of anger, out of deadline-induced panic. All I ask is that, when you sign your name to it, it is in fact yours." I'm wondering how to make that entire paragraph my PLEASE DO NOT USE GENERATIVE AI statement for my syllabi. Thank you for this - sometimes, I feel a bit like an outcast in my anti-AI stance!
I am so fascinated to learn what these conversations are like with students right now-- if anything is cutting through the zeitgeist in any way or if it all just feels insurmountable.
Both! I am arts-adjacent, so a lot of my students who want to go into creative work are absolutely against it. But it also feels like with each passing semester, I'm seeing more and more of it show up across the board and it's frustrating to feel like a significant part of my teaching work now is trying to redesign assessments to be more gen AI proof. (And I LOVE designing assessments - it's a creative challenge! But I also believe in the importance of knowing how to develop a written argument - but reading AI essays kills my soul so I'm moving more and more away from those.)
I love this piece, Garrett. My biggest gripe with AI has historically been that it’s not actually AI. There’s nothing “intelligent” about it. It’s just computers that are able to pound through tons of data at previously inconceivable speeds and then use an algorithm to put that data in an order it thinks its user will like.
This is why it feels so fake and forced.
The best analogy I’ve heard is that a 5 year old can navigate a busy intersection with some reasonable level of competence (I’M NOT ADVOCATING THIS-just an example) with no formal training. Their experience in the world and the way our brains process danger and learn through that experience would enable this.
An AI computer would get walloped by a car in seconds. It might “learn” what to do differently next time, but it’s not intelligent. It’s just inputting variables into an algorithm. It would have to try to cross that intersection 10,000 times to be able to do it successfully.
To me, this is where your essay comes in. The human experience is what “AI” does not and will never have. That’s what is crucially missing and we’re way too slow in regulating its use. The damage is being done to our brains (particularly those of our youth).
Oh, and to add, as a person who specializes in data analytics in my day job-- AI is in a way a bit of meaningless term which now encompasses many things that we used to just call 'predictive modeling' or 'machine learning.' Part of what worries me so much is the way in which we're being pushed to entrust important decisions to a system that is purely taken what has happened in the past and synthesized within a black box, which is a recipe for continuing to replicate the same biases and mistakes of the past, with no trail to show us where we went wrong.
I appreciate this first point (and decided while I was writing this to not differentiate into different things that are thrown under the umbrella AI and just call it "the robots," adding to the problem no doubt).
As for the broader point (about the black box), that all makes so much sense as well. A really good reason for actual tech professionals to join dumb laypeople like me in being nervous!
Your first paragraph is so spot-on. Let's say I asked ChatGPT to write a letter of condolence (note: I would not actually do this). Five years ago, if you were to search the web for "sample letters of condolence," you would have found tons of websites with various examples, written by humans to "help" other humans (or at least make money on ad revenue). All ChatGPT does is find those letters that are already out there and synthesize them.
I must confess. I went to Quaker high school and never learned grammar. My love for commas to indicate places that I pause to take a breath or get lost in thought makes me look like I love clauses like some people love their pets. Like clauses are maybe my family. Like I should probably take out a special insurance policy to care for them when they get away from me and run out into the street and get mauled, instead of just inserting them back in (with parentheses to hug them) because I love them so much.
So, it must be noted that I use AI to tell me that my grammar is such that you might imagine English is not my first (and currently only) language. And then usually I ignore it because I hate being told what to do. But if they come up with an AI-fueled self-cleaning refrigerator or, like, weird lasers that zap dust like they now have ones that zap weeds, I would probably go for that. Still, AI can pry my word choice out of my cold, dead, slightly Anglophile, shallow Southern hands.
Haha, I am with you on the commas. My English teacher partner (who I often ask to look over my writing) is constantly telling me how I overuse commas. But I love long sentences and everyone needs to breathe!
I hear that. I hate being told what to do. I don't even follow recipes. :P But I mostly don't yell at my computer. I just give it the silent treatment and glare at it a lot.
So WAIT, I have competition for my Comma Queen title?! I was doing essays for National Boards a couple decades back First year I missed by 2 points, so asked my young adult son who was a copy editor if he would look the new entries over and help me get them to the required word/page count. He told me that if I would just take the commas and run-on sentence ands out, I would have the word and page count!
I was incredibly fortunate to have been raised by an English teacher, and our home was often visited by other English professors, so as a result I was surrounded by rich conversation about language and creative pursuits. Could this reality have existed in a world dominated by AI; the thought that all of us would have our humanity so diminished breaks my heart. One of the strongest things I took from that education was the understanding that anything you write and put into the world, means relinquishing a part of the authorship, as each person reading it, integrates their own experience, and their imaginations connecting to ideas unforeseen by the author. If we buy the premise that it is the “content” that has value, and the people that flood the space with the most content are the most valued then yes AI is the tool for the job. But short-lived content creation that touches no one, and sparks no new ideas feels hollow and thin. I had the opportunity to speak to author and activist Astra Taylor after the last of the series of Massey Lectures she gave in 2023. I wanted to tell her about how much I couldn’t stop thinking about an article she’d written in 2018 and she was so moved she asked if she could give me hug. It turns out that having one real human person tell you how much something you created impacted them is worth more than all the faceless likes in the world.
Love that you told Taylor how much her piece meant to you. And you're spot on about what happens when we put writing in the world. That's the whole point! There is a great art of writing for oneself (journaling! terrific!), but the moment you choose to share writing with another point, the sharing is the whole point, not the product. It now lives in the world as an offering, which then grows and changes through the various ways its received.
I recommend the experience to everyone. Take the opportunity to tell a writer, an artist, a musician how much something they created affected you - the feeling will stay with you always. For the record, Garrett, I hope our paths cross one day and I can talk with you in person about how much this community you are creating has meant to me.
I am 69 years old and a wordy writer. I used AI a couple of times to tighten up emails that had a ton of info in them. But they don't even sound like me! I'm done with it, and need to work on my writing myself- good for my brain. Good column, thanks. Makes me feel slightly less like we are all doomed.
Well said, Garrett. We need to be able to trust not only that things are true but especially that they were created by other human beings. I think I will also add something about trust to the AI statements in my syllabi. Mostly because I'm looking hard for them, I've been encouraged to find more and more AI skeptics, dissenters, and outright AI luddites. Reading Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower, whose plot begins in a dystopian but absolutely recognizable 2024, is helping steel my resolve against the encroachment of AI.
AND Ms. Magazine, Garrett!!! Amazing! I cannot wait to grab my copy to read your analysis of Vance's grotesque manspreading.
I'm also just so grateful for you and other educators in this thread for doing everything you can to offer an alternative to this group think for your students. I know it isn't popular in the academy right now (which completely blows my mind) and I know I might sound paternalistic when I say this, but I have a feeling that students are going to truly appreciate educators who really pushed them to think and try and connect with each other in this moment.
You have an uncanny knack for writing precisely what I need to hear at any given moment. I’ve only been reading your work here since February, but each and every piece resonates deeply. Sometimes (including the first piece of yours I ever read), I text a friend with a quote and a link because it is LITERALLY something I said days prior, almost verbatim. Other times, like today, you help me grapple with my values and how/whether I am aware of and living them. And then there are the times when you give just the right amount of encouragement at just the right time.
So, just keep on being you. And know that there is someone hundreds of miles away who is benefitting deeply from your work.
I thought this was a really interesting article: AI Killed My Job: Tech workers at TikTok, Google, and across the industry share stories about how AI is changing, ruining, or replacing their jobs.
"The company leadership also recently (belatedly) declared that 'we are going all in on AI.'
"I don’t use AI. I morally object to it, for reasons I hardly need to explain to you. And now I feel like I’m hiding plain sight, terrified someone will notice I’m actually doing all my own work."
Bless you Garrett! You are the first person I know who feels as passionately about AI as I do. Well, perhaps the second…Ann Telnes, the cartoonist who resigned from WaPo for being censored, said that art derived from AI is, unequivocally, plagiarism. I have been trying to convince my colleagues of this since I first heard one of them say “ChatGPT is so fun!” I have been fighting a losing battle so far. I keep trying.
Two months ago one of our committees started using an AI interpretation of our discussions as minutes. I took on the job of revising the output to make sure it accurately reflects the substance of the meeting. The first month was not too complicated. But the second month, it was so much work to disentangle reality from the robot’s perception that I now wonder if it is worth bothering with, even as a first pass - it might be just as easy to work directly from the meeting transcript!
And don’t get me started on data mining! We have learned NOTHING from Cambridge Analytica and the Mueller Report and Trump’s first impeachment. Maybe some of us prefer not to be human?
One of the reasons why I keep shouting about my particular bugbears (community, trust, each other) is that I still think there's a tiny window to remember that we actually want to be human to each other, but I hope it doesn't close!
I am on a nonprofit board that meets via Zoom, and my experience has been that the Zoom assistant's "minutes" are surprisingly good. Anyone who has ever served on an all-volunteer board knows that it's REALLY difficult to find someone willing to take the minutes, so I'm OK with this particular use. There's no plagiarism involved, and we can review them afterward, so if anything seemed particularly off, someone would catch it. However, I am sure this isn't universally applicable, and that not all committees would be well-served by the robot "secretary."
This feels related, but I have been trying to consciously curb the impulse to pick up my phone in a moment of boredom/down time. I think the impulse to use Chat GPT is similar--it's become a habit for people that feels unstoppable because it's become an automatic reflex. I suspect the best thing we can do for both of these scenarios is either try to disrupt that habit or don't let it develop in the first place. Just taking that few seconds to think about what else I could be doing in the moment instead of scrolling Instagram has been really valuable for me. Maybe I will still end up on the phone if I don't decide on a better option, but I have noticed myself being less interested in whatever us on the phone since I started doing this. The other night, I just did not want to be on the internet and ended up turning on the radio broadcast of a baseball game and just listening with my eyes closed. I don't think I made a really special, superior moral choice, but I will say, the experience was just really nice! It makes me think about how it's okay to endure a little bit of discomfort because it can lead you to a better result in the end.
This is super resonant with me (I too am trying to do the same thing with my phone). I wonder if maybe my resistance to AI is, in part, a retroactive longing for having wished I did that with smartphones-- been more resistant before it became such an entrenched part of my life.
This is a beautiful and necessary piece. I’ve read it more than once, sitting with both the grief and the clarity in it.
I want to add a small complication, not as a rebuttal but as someone who exists inside a strange overlap. I wrote a novel—fiction, not memoir—inspired by my experience with schizoaffective bipolar disorder. I’d tried to write it before, more than once, and each time I spiraled. The immersion required to build a world, live inside it, and hold it all in my head—it's a kind of magic, but for me, it’s also a danger. One attempt landed me in the psych ward.
This time, I used ChatGPT. Not to write the story for me, but to help me build scaffolding I could then thrash, gut, and rewrite by hand. It gave shape to the storm, long enough for me to wrestle it into something my brain could survive. The story, every word, is mine. But I don’t think I could have gotten there without the tool.
And that’s the tension. The same technology that helped me finish something I deeply cared about has also, I know, contributed to real harm. It has fed delusions. It has blurred lines. It has done exactly what you fear.
So yes, I’m wary too. But I also don’t want to lose the nuance, especially when the line between creation and collapse can get so paper-thin for some of us.
Thanks for adding in the nuances. It sounds like you found a way to use this tool in a way that strengthened rather than sapping the way you needed to communicate and the story you need to tell. And I love that you're able to celebrate that while also living in the critiques and the discomfort too. Sounds like pretty impressive nuance-holding-- both as a writer and a person.
We got the McFlurry on a whim, and they must have product tested the heck out of it, bc it is perfect. We got it for the 6 yo, but my partner and I ended up finishing the whole thing and commenting on its junk food perfection.
Re: My college students--I could say so much about this, and plan to in an upcoming post. But the short answer is: Yes, my students still (for the most part) write actual human thoughts! Also they are some of the most privileged students on Planet Earth, and I fear that those with elite education might soon be the only ones who do that.
Would be curious what you think about all this bc as writers, we would be like cha-chinging all the way to the bank if readers actually *wanted to read and pay for AI slop. Like, we could just put in a prompt every day and eat our McFlurries and sit back while our paid subscribers just come pouring in. But no one wants to seem to READ this stuff. So why on Earth would we TEACH it??
This is one of my worries (not about the mcflurries-- I have no worries about those, but about AI and colleges). I was talking to a Professor friend of mine (who is in this chat too but I didn't want to dox her, though she's welcome to dox herself) who teaches at a public access university and she told me about how elite colleges are leading the way on encouraging actual non-AI writing and thought. On one hand it's good that any place is holding the line, but it's not hard to imagine what's about to happen down the line if that kind of class striation persists.
I have so many thoughts about this! But I will say that my partner teaches public high school (after years in academia) and it's only gotten really bad in the last year or two with AI usage, so those kids are on their way to you. One of the problems is that colleges can and usually do have extremely harsh penalties for AI usage (it IS plagiarism), but public schools are under immense pressure to graduate kids and maintain good numbers to keep their paltry funding so kids get away with it. What happens when those kids who never learned how to write at a basic level are expected to write at the college level? I worry that we are setting so many kids up to fail. :/
Trust. Yes. I was reading an essay on Medium this week, and I clapped before I finished reading, and then, midway through, one word - a word often used in my students’ AI generated papers - caused me to copy and paste the essay into an AI detector and yep. I didn’t finish the essay and really wished I would not have “clapped” for it.
As an educator- I’ve been ready to quit over the AI use in papers and discussions. I teach college writing and film classes online part time. There have been some classes where it’s been like 85-90% of the students using generative AI. It’s taken all the joy out of teaching for me. Unfortunately, unless I can find some other way to make money working from home, I’m pretty stuck. It’s awful that so many students are going to graduate without having to learn anything other than coming up with great ChatGPT prompts.
Masterclass. After teaching a film class for five years, and suddenly that word shows up in just about every student paper where they write about an auteur director.
For me, it's when students describe something (an argument, a film, a shot, whatever) as "compelling." I have never seen that word used as much as I have in the last 6 months with the rise of genAI.
Without in any way questioning your report of student AI use, I immediately thought of how often I use the word "compelling." Which is a lot. And I never use AI. (Almost literally. I tried it before I started teaching my most recent class to see if it could do a better job than other tools I have students use. The answer is no.) I am not representative of students, even a little.
I do wonder about how we'll know, eventually. That is, various terms and phrases get popular. I can completely imagine a feedback loop in which AI starts feeding "compelling" but that leads to an increase in the use of the word, which gets other people using it more because now it's salient. Now, I don't really think students are *reading* what AI spits out before they turn it in. (They would catch the intro "I am just a machine" more often!) But I do suspect that to some extent, AI generated catch phrases are going to get picked up by popular culture.
That's an interesting theory! And also, what I notice experiencing this exchange as a reader is that it's making me more paranoid and suspicious about how other people are using language (whether they're getting it from AI or not) which is reducing my overall level of societal trust!
In general, everything new is old. There are a ton of ways in which use of AI isn't that different from uses of previous technologies. Someone had a comment about using ChatGPT to write an obituary, and the observation was made that it used to be you could find templates or examples for obituaries online. And before that, you used exemplars from the obits page in the newspaper. So, like, some people will always do things from scratch and others will do things not from scratch and most people will be somewhere in between. I teach teachers, and I talk to them about how cheating is cheating - right now it's AI, but before this it was Chegg, and before that it was texting the answers, and before that it was passing notes or looking at your neighbor's paper. People haven't changed. Most people are trustworthy and lovable and imperfect.
Same thing with culture. Think about how many catch phrases you got from friends who got them from TV. Or you got from a movie and passed on through (over)use to other people. "You can't handle the truth!" is still awesome, even if it's derivative.
I love your push to consider the ways this moment rhymes with previous moments. You are right. Kids have been plagiarizing essays forever! Musicians and artists riff of of and steal from each other. We take inspiration, sometimes iteratively sometimes as a mirror. Really great points. AND I think there's truth to the ways that this moment feels particularly tenuous for so many (the ubiquity of generative AI, the immense amounts of money behind it, the environmental impact of it, the way that these tools have been pushed onto devices without us asking for it, the way that many universities are actively partnering with tools that can be used for cheating (to my knowledge, no college ever partnered with Cliff Notes), the ease by which you can push a button, have something created for you, and claim it by your own). I'm so glad that you're helping ease the anxieties of educators you're training, but I also think there's truth in the concerns that others have shared in this space too. I love that this space can be one where multiple truths are held at once.
You are more polite about this than I am. Using AI is complying in advance and showing willingness to outsource your ability to think and communicate to our tech bro overlords. Basically, it is for fascist, extractive capitalist losers.
(I am married to an English teacher so I have to hear EVERY SINGLE DAY about how much the kids use it and I am terrified that we are raising a generation of people with very little ability to think critically because the adults haven't bothered to figure out how to use the new shiny thing responsibly, and we've just made it the water that these kids swim in.)
I am so, so sorry to every single educator right now. And, for them, maybe I need to write another one that leans more into the rage than just the plaintiveness! I'm so sad for everybody-- we've been convinced that all this (the actual living and trying) isn't worth it.
Also, a very relevant poem: https://poets.org/poem/student-who-used-ai-write-paper
I’m glad Garrett linked to the MIT study in this piece. I’m also an educator for graduate level classes that involve a lot of coding and I’ve had students who are clearly struggling turn in assignments that are way beyond what we’ve even covered and when confronted (gently), they still insisted it was their work. I brought this up to my therapist because aside from it feeling like a true insult to me that they were trying to gaslight me in believing that this was their work, I feel like I failed them in making them comfortable enough to approach me about their struggles, as opposed to just turning to AI. It’s a weird space to navigate for sure.
My grandmother passed away this week, and I felt compelled to write her obituary. It was therapeutic and a labor of love to try to capture the life of someone who meant so much to so many. In reviewing it, one of my aunts said she was glad I’d written it because she was just going to use ChatGPT. Her response was inconceivable to me. Let a robot remember our matriarch? By simply putting in dates and names of relatives? No thank you.
First off, Allison, sending so much love to your family. Reading this (and I had the same reaction you did, of course), it made me think about how much we've been made to doubt ourselves. I could be totally off base, but a loved one who turns to Chat GPT in a moment of grief strikes me as somebody who feels like, for whatever reason, that what they have to offer their family and community isn't enough. And that's tragic!
Thank you for writing your grandmother's obituary.
A family story told by my mother:
My grandmother died when my parents were in their 20’s. My grandfather brought in a rabbi to conduct her funeral. But the rabbi knew nothing about my grandmother, and it showed. My father was so enraged that he expelled that clueless rabbi from the funeral.
My interpretation of this story, which happened long before I was born, is that this was something that made my mother love my father even more.
We want to be known and seen (and want our loved ones to be known and seen)!
"I will choose anything you create— out of love, out of hope, out of sadness, out of anger, out of deadline-induced panic. All I ask is that, when you sign your name to it, it is in fact yours." I'm wondering how to make that entire paragraph my PLEASE DO NOT USE GENERATIVE AI statement for my syllabi. Thank you for this - sometimes, I feel a bit like an outcast in my anti-AI stance!
I am so fascinated to learn what these conversations are like with students right now-- if anything is cutting through the zeitgeist in any way or if it all just feels insurmountable.
Both! I am arts-adjacent, so a lot of my students who want to go into creative work are absolutely against it. But it also feels like with each passing semester, I'm seeing more and more of it show up across the board and it's frustrating to feel like a significant part of my teaching work now is trying to redesign assessments to be more gen AI proof. (And I LOVE designing assessments - it's a creative challenge! But I also believe in the importance of knowing how to develop a written argument - but reading AI essays kills my soul so I'm moving more and more away from those.)
Oooh coming back with a link for you from someone on substack who went to making students create zines in her writing classes due to AI
https://substack.com/@abigailschleifer/note/c-116324938?r=1iil3&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action
Yes, zines! I do have one class that makes them and they are overall GREAT.
I love this piece, Garrett. My biggest gripe with AI has historically been that it’s not actually AI. There’s nothing “intelligent” about it. It’s just computers that are able to pound through tons of data at previously inconceivable speeds and then use an algorithm to put that data in an order it thinks its user will like.
This is why it feels so fake and forced.
The best analogy I’ve heard is that a 5 year old can navigate a busy intersection with some reasonable level of competence (I’M NOT ADVOCATING THIS-just an example) with no formal training. Their experience in the world and the way our brains process danger and learn through that experience would enable this.
An AI computer would get walloped by a car in seconds. It might “learn” what to do differently next time, but it’s not intelligent. It’s just inputting variables into an algorithm. It would have to try to cross that intersection 10,000 times to be able to do it successfully.
To me, this is where your essay comes in. The human experience is what “AI” does not and will never have. That’s what is crucially missing and we’re way too slow in regulating its use. The damage is being done to our brains (particularly those of our youth).
Really well put, but you'll forgive me I hope for laughing at your parenthetical I AM NOT ADVOCATING THIS disclaimer.
Oh, and to add, as a person who specializes in data analytics in my day job-- AI is in a way a bit of meaningless term which now encompasses many things that we used to just call 'predictive modeling' or 'machine learning.' Part of what worries me so much is the way in which we're being pushed to entrust important decisions to a system that is purely taken what has happened in the past and synthesized within a black box, which is a recipe for continuing to replicate the same biases and mistakes of the past, with no trail to show us where we went wrong.
I appreciate this first point (and decided while I was writing this to not differentiate into different things that are thrown under the umbrella AI and just call it "the robots," adding to the problem no doubt).
As for the broader point (about the black box), that all makes so much sense as well. A really good reason for actual tech professionals to join dumb laypeople like me in being nervous!
Your first paragraph is so spot-on. Let's say I asked ChatGPT to write a letter of condolence (note: I would not actually do this). Five years ago, if you were to search the web for "sample letters of condolence," you would have found tons of websites with various examples, written by humans to "help" other humans (or at least make money on ad revenue). All ChatGPT does is find those letters that are already out there and synthesize them.
I must confess. I went to Quaker high school and never learned grammar. My love for commas to indicate places that I pause to take a breath or get lost in thought makes me look like I love clauses like some people love their pets. Like clauses are maybe my family. Like I should probably take out a special insurance policy to care for them when they get away from me and run out into the street and get mauled, instead of just inserting them back in (with parentheses to hug them) because I love them so much.
So, it must be noted that I use AI to tell me that my grammar is such that you might imagine English is not my first (and currently only) language. And then usually I ignore it because I hate being told what to do. But if they come up with an AI-fueled self-cleaning refrigerator or, like, weird lasers that zap dust like they now have ones that zap weeds, I would probably go for that. Still, AI can pry my word choice out of my cold, dead, slightly Anglophile, shallow Southern hands.
Haha, I am with you on the commas. My English teacher partner (who I often ask to look over my writing) is constantly telling me how I overuse commas. But I love long sentences and everyone needs to breathe!
Amen! Or rather, amen, amen, amen, and praises for all commas, Oxford and otherwise!
I think I can get into an antagonistic relationship with AI, where you do ask for its opinion but then tell it to shove off.
I hear that. I hate being told what to do. I don't even follow recipes. :P But I mostly don't yell at my computer. I just give it the silent treatment and glare at it a lot.
I’m also fine with this passive aggressive relationship. It knows what it did.
So WAIT, I have competition for my Comma Queen title?! I was doing essays for National Boards a couple decades back First year I missed by 2 points, so asked my young adult son who was a copy editor if he would look the new entries over and help me get them to the required word/page count. He told me that if I would just take the commas and run-on sentence ands out, I would have the word and page count!
I was incredibly fortunate to have been raised by an English teacher, and our home was often visited by other English professors, so as a result I was surrounded by rich conversation about language and creative pursuits. Could this reality have existed in a world dominated by AI; the thought that all of us would have our humanity so diminished breaks my heart. One of the strongest things I took from that education was the understanding that anything you write and put into the world, means relinquishing a part of the authorship, as each person reading it, integrates their own experience, and their imaginations connecting to ideas unforeseen by the author. If we buy the premise that it is the “content” that has value, and the people that flood the space with the most content are the most valued then yes AI is the tool for the job. But short-lived content creation that touches no one, and sparks no new ideas feels hollow and thin. I had the opportunity to speak to author and activist Astra Taylor after the last of the series of Massey Lectures she gave in 2023. I wanted to tell her about how much I couldn’t stop thinking about an article she’d written in 2018 and she was so moved she asked if she could give me hug. It turns out that having one real human person tell you how much something you created impacted them is worth more than all the faceless likes in the world.
BTW, if you are interested, this is the article:
https://logicmag.io/failure/the-automation-charade/
Love that you told Taylor how much her piece meant to you. And you're spot on about what happens when we put writing in the world. That's the whole point! There is a great art of writing for oneself (journaling! terrific!), but the moment you choose to share writing with another point, the sharing is the whole point, not the product. It now lives in the world as an offering, which then grows and changes through the various ways its received.
I recommend the experience to everyone. Take the opportunity to tell a writer, an artist, a musician how much something they created affected you - the feeling will stay with you always. For the record, Garrett, I hope our paths cross one day and I can talk with you in person about how much this community you are creating has meant to me.
Thanks Emily!
Stealing words the old-fashioned way — from humans who said it first (or better).
"This isn't AI — this is my emotional support em dash."
"You can pry my em dash out of my cold, dead hands."
"You know the AI writing we've edited is garbage, right?" (Fellow editor in our group layoff meeting to the manager running it.)
hahahah
I am 69 years old and a wordy writer. I used AI a couple of times to tighten up emails that had a ton of info in them. But they don't even sound like me! I'm done with it, and need to work on my writing myself- good for my brain. Good column, thanks. Makes me feel slightly less like we are all doomed.
As a fellow wordy writer, I'd rather have each other's loquaciousness than a robot's brevity.
Well said, Garrett. We need to be able to trust not only that things are true but especially that they were created by other human beings. I think I will also add something about trust to the AI statements in my syllabi. Mostly because I'm looking hard for them, I've been encouraged to find more and more AI skeptics, dissenters, and outright AI luddites. Reading Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower, whose plot begins in a dystopian but absolutely recognizable 2024, is helping steel my resolve against the encroachment of AI.
AND Ms. Magazine, Garrett!!! Amazing! I cannot wait to grab my copy to read your analysis of Vance's grotesque manspreading.
Butler > AI, every day of the week.
I'm also just so grateful for you and other educators in this thread for doing everything you can to offer an alternative to this group think for your students. I know it isn't popular in the academy right now (which completely blows my mind) and I know I might sound paternalistic when I say this, but I have a feeling that students are going to truly appreciate educators who really pushed them to think and try and connect with each other in this moment.
You have an uncanny knack for writing precisely what I need to hear at any given moment. I’ve only been reading your work here since February, but each and every piece resonates deeply. Sometimes (including the first piece of yours I ever read), I text a friend with a quote and a link because it is LITERALLY something I said days prior, almost verbatim. Other times, like today, you help me grapple with my values and how/whether I am aware of and living them. And then there are the times when you give just the right amount of encouragement at just the right time.
So, just keep on being you. And know that there is someone hundreds of miles away who is benefitting deeply from your work.
Oh thank you Theresa! So glad that we found each other and my apologies for occasionally reading your mind lol.
I thought this was a really interesting article: AI Killed My Job: Tech workers at TikTok, Google, and across the industry share stories about how AI is changing, ruining, or replacing their jobs.
https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/how-ai-is-killing-jobs-in-the-tech-f39
It's pretty long, but if you only read one of the essays, make it this one: https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/i/166816747/then-came-the-tomatoes
"The company leadership also recently (belatedly) declared that 'we are going all in on AI.'
"I don’t use AI. I morally object to it, for reasons I hardly need to explain to you. And now I feel like I’m hiding plain sight, terrified someone will notice I’m actually doing all my own work."
that second link is the most life affirming emoji story I've ever read
Bless you Garrett! You are the first person I know who feels as passionately about AI as I do. Well, perhaps the second…Ann Telnes, the cartoonist who resigned from WaPo for being censored, said that art derived from AI is, unequivocally, plagiarism. I have been trying to convince my colleagues of this since I first heard one of them say “ChatGPT is so fun!” I have been fighting a losing battle so far. I keep trying.
Two months ago one of our committees started using an AI interpretation of our discussions as minutes. I took on the job of revising the output to make sure it accurately reflects the substance of the meeting. The first month was not too complicated. But the second month, it was so much work to disentangle reality from the robot’s perception that I now wonder if it is worth bothering with, even as a first pass - it might be just as easy to work directly from the meeting transcript!
And don’t get me started on data mining! We have learned NOTHING from Cambridge Analytica and the Mueller Report and Trump’s first impeachment. Maybe some of us prefer not to be human?
One of the reasons why I keep shouting about my particular bugbears (community, trust, each other) is that I still think there's a tiny window to remember that we actually want to be human to each other, but I hope it doesn't close!
I am on a nonprofit board that meets via Zoom, and my experience has been that the Zoom assistant's "minutes" are surprisingly good. Anyone who has ever served on an all-volunteer board knows that it's REALLY difficult to find someone willing to take the minutes, so I'm OK with this particular use. There's no plagiarism involved, and we can review them afterward, so if anything seemed particularly off, someone would catch it. However, I am sure this isn't universally applicable, and that not all committees would be well-served by the robot "secretary."
This feels related, but I have been trying to consciously curb the impulse to pick up my phone in a moment of boredom/down time. I think the impulse to use Chat GPT is similar--it's become a habit for people that feels unstoppable because it's become an automatic reflex. I suspect the best thing we can do for both of these scenarios is either try to disrupt that habit or don't let it develop in the first place. Just taking that few seconds to think about what else I could be doing in the moment instead of scrolling Instagram has been really valuable for me. Maybe I will still end up on the phone if I don't decide on a better option, but I have noticed myself being less interested in whatever us on the phone since I started doing this. The other night, I just did not want to be on the internet and ended up turning on the radio broadcast of a baseball game and just listening with my eyes closed. I don't think I made a really special, superior moral choice, but I will say, the experience was just really nice! It makes me think about how it's okay to endure a little bit of discomfort because it can lead you to a better result in the end.
This is super resonant with me (I too am trying to do the same thing with my phone). I wonder if maybe my resistance to AI is, in part, a retroactive longing for having wished I did that with smartphones-- been more resistant before it became such an entrenched part of my life.
This is a beautiful and necessary piece. I’ve read it more than once, sitting with both the grief and the clarity in it.
I want to add a small complication, not as a rebuttal but as someone who exists inside a strange overlap. I wrote a novel—fiction, not memoir—inspired by my experience with schizoaffective bipolar disorder. I’d tried to write it before, more than once, and each time I spiraled. The immersion required to build a world, live inside it, and hold it all in my head—it's a kind of magic, but for me, it’s also a danger. One attempt landed me in the psych ward.
This time, I used ChatGPT. Not to write the story for me, but to help me build scaffolding I could then thrash, gut, and rewrite by hand. It gave shape to the storm, long enough for me to wrestle it into something my brain could survive. The story, every word, is mine. But I don’t think I could have gotten there without the tool.
And that’s the tension. The same technology that helped me finish something I deeply cared about has also, I know, contributed to real harm. It has fed delusions. It has blurred lines. It has done exactly what you fear.
So yes, I’m wary too. But I also don’t want to lose the nuance, especially when the line between creation and collapse can get so paper-thin for some of us.
Thanks for adding in the nuances. It sounds like you found a way to use this tool in a way that strengthened rather than sapping the way you needed to communicate and the story you need to tell. And I love that you're able to celebrate that while also living in the critiques and the discomfort too. Sounds like pretty impressive nuance-holding-- both as a writer and a person.
As a uni prof who teaches writing—amen, my friend!
Also: that s’mores McFlurry is solid!!
Re: the S'mores McFlurry. It ran laps around my expectations. 10/10 fast food dessert.
And re: your day job. I'm so sorry. Have you been able to cut through the noise with your students?
We got the McFlurry on a whim, and they must have product tested the heck out of it, bc it is perfect. We got it for the 6 yo, but my partner and I ended up finishing the whole thing and commenting on its junk food perfection.
Re: My college students--I could say so much about this, and plan to in an upcoming post. But the short answer is: Yes, my students still (for the most part) write actual human thoughts! Also they are some of the most privileged students on Planet Earth, and I fear that those with elite education might soon be the only ones who do that.
Would be curious what you think about all this bc as writers, we would be like cha-chinging all the way to the bank if readers actually *wanted to read and pay for AI slop. Like, we could just put in a prompt every day and eat our McFlurries and sit back while our paid subscribers just come pouring in. But no one wants to seem to READ this stuff. So why on Earth would we TEACH it??
This is one of my worries (not about the mcflurries-- I have no worries about those, but about AI and colleges). I was talking to a Professor friend of mine (who is in this chat too but I didn't want to dox her, though she's welcome to dox herself) who teaches at a public access university and she told me about how elite colleges are leading the way on encouraging actual non-AI writing and thought. On one hand it's good that any place is holding the line, but it's not hard to imagine what's about to happen down the line if that kind of class striation persists.
I have so many thoughts about this! But I will say that my partner teaches public high school (after years in academia) and it's only gotten really bad in the last year or two with AI usage, so those kids are on their way to you. One of the problems is that colleges can and usually do have extremely harsh penalties for AI usage (it IS plagiarism), but public schools are under immense pressure to graduate kids and maintain good numbers to keep their paltry funding so kids get away with it. What happens when those kids who never learned how to write at a basic level are expected to write at the college level? I worry that we are setting so many kids up to fail. :/
I have this same concern! I think the class gap is likely to get even wider bc of what you are describing
Trust. Yes. I was reading an essay on Medium this week, and I clapped before I finished reading, and then, midway through, one word - a word often used in my students’ AI generated papers - caused me to copy and paste the essay into an AI detector and yep. I didn’t finish the essay and really wished I would not have “clapped” for it.
As an educator- I’ve been ready to quit over the AI use in papers and discussions. I teach college writing and film classes online part time. There have been some classes where it’s been like 85-90% of the students using generative AI. It’s taken all the joy out of teaching for me. Unfortunately, unless I can find some other way to make money working from home, I’m pretty stuck. It’s awful that so many students are going to graduate without having to learn anything other than coming up with great ChatGPT prompts.
I’m so curious what the one word was!
Masterclass. After teaching a film class for five years, and suddenly that word shows up in just about every student paper where they write about an auteur director.
Oh FASCINATING.
For me, it's when students describe something (an argument, a film, a shot, whatever) as "compelling." I have never seen that word used as much as I have in the last 6 months with the rise of genAI.
Without in any way questioning your report of student AI use, I immediately thought of how often I use the word "compelling." Which is a lot. And I never use AI. (Almost literally. I tried it before I started teaching my most recent class to see if it could do a better job than other tools I have students use. The answer is no.) I am not representative of students, even a little.
I do wonder about how we'll know, eventually. That is, various terms and phrases get popular. I can completely imagine a feedback loop in which AI starts feeding "compelling" but that leads to an increase in the use of the word, which gets other people using it more because now it's salient. Now, I don't really think students are *reading* what AI spits out before they turn it in. (They would catch the intro "I am just a machine" more often!) But I do suspect that to some extent, AI generated catch phrases are going to get picked up by popular culture.
That's an interesting theory! And also, what I notice experiencing this exchange as a reader is that it's making me more paranoid and suspicious about how other people are using language (whether they're getting it from AI or not) which is reducing my overall level of societal trust!
Nooooo. Trust! trust! trust!
In general, everything new is old. There are a ton of ways in which use of AI isn't that different from uses of previous technologies. Someone had a comment about using ChatGPT to write an obituary, and the observation was made that it used to be you could find templates or examples for obituaries online. And before that, you used exemplars from the obits page in the newspaper. So, like, some people will always do things from scratch and others will do things not from scratch and most people will be somewhere in between. I teach teachers, and I talk to them about how cheating is cheating - right now it's AI, but before this it was Chegg, and before that it was texting the answers, and before that it was passing notes or looking at your neighbor's paper. People haven't changed. Most people are trustworthy and lovable and imperfect.
Same thing with culture. Think about how many catch phrases you got from friends who got them from TV. Or you got from a movie and passed on through (over)use to other people. "You can't handle the truth!" is still awesome, even if it's derivative.
I love your push to consider the ways this moment rhymes with previous moments. You are right. Kids have been plagiarizing essays forever! Musicians and artists riff of of and steal from each other. We take inspiration, sometimes iteratively sometimes as a mirror. Really great points. AND I think there's truth to the ways that this moment feels particularly tenuous for so many (the ubiquity of generative AI, the immense amounts of money behind it, the environmental impact of it, the way that these tools have been pushed onto devices without us asking for it, the way that many universities are actively partnering with tools that can be used for cheating (to my knowledge, no college ever partnered with Cliff Notes), the ease by which you can push a button, have something created for you, and claim it by your own). I'm so glad that you're helping ease the anxieties of educators you're training, but I also think there's truth in the concerns that others have shared in this space too. I love that this space can be one where multiple truths are held at once.
[Not because of how you two are discussing it, mind you, because once I start thinking "wait, who is using AI' it's hard to stop!].