I try to avoid reading long texts created by AI. I prefer to spend my time reading stuff written by humans. But, since I work in academia, I’ve started to see AI content: essays submitted by students who procrastinated, hallucinated citations, overly broad topic ideas that would work better as book titles. The biggest tell to me is how offensively bland it is. AI text (unless you play around with the fun settings and tell the AI to write like a pirate or a troubadour) is always just pap to me; it says nothing and does it in the dullest prose I’ve ever seen. What I love about human writing is that, even at its least scintillating, is that it sounds like an individual. I adore snarky book reviews, pointed political commentary, rambling stories, and dumb puns.
Over the last semester, as my university’s administration has gotten increasingly excited about incorporating AI into teaching and workflows, I’ve talked with faculty and colleagues in the library about what it will mean for writing. It’s hard to teach good writing. It’s hard to become a good writer, and so many of the students I’ve met are paralyzed by the process of putting down words. Telling them that practice and reading a lot are the only proven ways to get good at writing is frustrating for them when the words don’t come naturally. It doesn’t help that us academics are the people for whom the words usually do come naturally. We love words and it’s hard to understand why others don’t live and breathe language.
AI is a shortcut. It can be a very useful tool for folks who have to write but struggle due to dyslexia, writing in a second (or third) language, lack of experience, etc., etc. What I worry about, however, is that using AI to do the work–rather than just using it to draft or suggest options–is that it might hamper the development of unique voices. Learning to write clearly and grammatically is really just a first step. Once you know the rules, you can start breaking them as you create your own style. There’s no way I would’ve submitted writing in high school or college that had em dashes in it. There wouldn’t have been nearly as many parentheticals (which I enjoy because I can use them to say twice as much in the same sentence. I would’ve been docked for using colloquial language and swearing. And I’ll admit right now that I had no idea what the hell a semi-colon was for; I used to use them to avoid using comma splices. (I also didn’t understand what a comma splice was for and I’m still fuzzy on the rules for their usage even now.)
When a student would ask me to take a look at their writing, I would often see students attempting to write in an academic register. They’d use words pulled from a thesaurus without checking to make sure the word meant what they wanted it to. They’d use three times as many words to say something as necessary. In these cases, I would set the draft aside and ask the student to explain to me what they’d found in their research and what they were arguing. Most of the time, the student would be able to state their findings in concise, clear terms. That’s when I would tell them to write exactly what they’d just said. These were moments of revelation for students because, after reading all of those required scholarly sources, it didn’t occur to many of them that their own voice (with a little polishing for grammar and spelling) was even allowed in their college writing. Once they started to really use their own words in their writing, that writing would come to life. I hope their professors appreciated the change.
So while I would suggest AI text generators for students who struggle to get their words out, I sincerely hope that they will be able to get their own voice into whatever the AI suggests. Without unique voices, reading the news and other content will become painfully boring.