Writing is thinking

So maybe it's not the best idea to let AI to do it for us

For the first time in one my classes last fall, a student turned in a paper that had clearly been written by AI. We have software in our learning management system that flags writing that’s likely AI-generated, usually giving a percent likelihood that the paper was written by AI.

Even had I not seen this flag, I would have given the paper a zero. It was a very bad paper. The assignment was to use a sociological theorist (Emile Durkheim) to explain a podcast about what happened to schooling during the pandemic, when students were no longer in-person. It was clear that for all the sophistication of AI, it could not get access to the podcast. The paper included no specific details. It mentioned some concepts from Emile Durkheim, though not the ones we’d discussed in class. It had no idea how to apply those concepts to an actual real-life situation. 

In sum, I was pretty unimpressed with the writing ability of AI.

There’s every chance that this might change. Maybe AI will learn and grow and figure out how to listen to podcasts and start turning out amazing papers for sociological theory. I don’t much care one way or the other. I am sincerely hopeful that in five years, we’ll look at each other over cocktails and say, “Remember when everyone was all freaked out about AI?” I do not find AI particularly impressive so far. If it learns how to wash dishes, I’ll reconsider.

My attitude towards students using AI to do their work isn’t anger. Over my twenty years of teaching I’ve worked very hard on not responding to the behavior of my students with anger. It’s not conducive to good pedagogy and also, it’s exhausting to be angry at students (or anyone) all the time.

I do think of AI as a whole new category of cheating. Rules about plagiarism have always struck me as a bit classist and ethnocentric. The students who are most familiar with the rules of citation are almost inevitably from the best high schools, which is to say, the wealthiest high schools. If you don’t know the rules about what and when and how to cite, it’s easy to commit plagiarism unintentionally. It’s always felt to me like a form of social class gatekeeping and so I’m often pretty lenient int his area. Given that I give assignments where students do work together (at one point, student exams were oral and in groups), I’m not really outraged by that kind of cheating, either.

There is no way, though, to accidentally use AI to write your paper. There’s intention there and I think most students understand that it is against the rules to use AI in this way.

Photo by Igor Omilaev on Unsplash

Still, when that student last fall used AI to write their paper, I wasn’t angry. My predominant response was to shrug. Huh, I thought. That’s sort of stupid. I feel this way about many of the activities students engage in to get out of the work that is learning, especially when they expound more energy to not do the work I’ve asked them to do than actually doing the work would have involved. What a waste, I mostly think.

I teach at a private college. The current tuition is $41,559. That’s a lot of money, even if, with tuition discount (the amount of scholarships and financial aid students receive), most students will never pay that actual amount. They’ll still pay A LOT of money to sit in my classroom.

What’s more, they’ve chosen to pay that money and to sit in my classroom. Maybe they didn’t choose to go to college in a time period where for many middle class and upper middle class kids, college feels mandatory. But they probably had some say in which college they went to and they picked mine, with it’s considerable price tag and small classes and expectation that they’ll write. A lot.

No one’s making them sit there in the my classroom. No one’s making them take sociological theory. But for some reason that is probably only barely accessible to their still-developing minds, they feel that there’s something valuable about going to college. Something happens in those classrooms that is important to their lives. Perhaps one of those things is writing a paper about Durkheim. Maybe. Hard to say for sure.

Maybe, just maybe, writing about a lot of things is an important part of that college experience. Writing, is after all, one essential way that we as human beings figure out what we think about the world. It is, in fact, a type of thinking. As I sit here at this keyboard, trying to articulate my half-formed ideas about writing and AI in my head, I am thinking. Thinking with words in a fairly systematic way. By the end of this essay, my ideas about writing and AI will be better developed than they were at the beginning.¹ They might even change altogether.

I really can’t say it better than

John Warner

, who’s post inspired this one:

The core message of my forthcoming book, More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI is that writing is an inherently human activity, and that “writing” is not synonymous or interchangeable with text generation. The act of writing is an experience during which we think, feel, and communicate, and any time we outsource writing to a text generator, we are denying ourselves that experience.

What’s sad about students using AI is that they are opting out of what, I believe, is the essential experience of education. They are paying a lot of money for a certain experience and then finding a way out of that experience. Or as John Warner says better than me again:

But cheating [with AI] is not just a circumvention of norms around academic dishonesty, it is also the denial of an experience. We might say that from that lens, doing an end run around a learning opportunity means students are only “cheating themselves,” so to speak, but when students talk about their choice to use LLMs as a shortcut to the production of an academic artifact, they rarely consider that they may be missing out on something of value.

It's certainly puzzling that students (and their parents) pay a great deal of money for an experience that they then find a way out of actually, you know, experiencing. There are certainly lots of reasons they might feel this way about college writing. Some college writing assignments feel like nothing more than checking boxes rather than actual learning experiences and the fault for that lies squarely on us as professors.

Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash

There are lots of other reasons why students might resent and therefore avoid the actual learning experiences of the college classroom. Often little in their high school careers, which is designed as a series of boxes to be checked, prepares them for a different orientation. They’re coming from a culture that is increasingly hostile to college campuses and what goes on there, as seen in the attempt of countless legislators to determine what gets taught and what does not.

Truthfully, conservatives have good reason to be nervous about what happens on college campuses, or at least about what used to happen. What I’m trying to do in my classes is teach students how to think. This is why writing is important. I’m trying to teach them how to ask why. I’m trying to get them to question the status quo. I’m trying to, yes, blow their minds. For conservatives, that’s pretty dangerous stuff.

Well, let’s be honest, for Americans in general, that’s pretty dangerous stuff. We’re not a culture that’s big on things like thinking and questioning. It’s difficult and uncomfortable and wouldn’t it be so much easier to just have AI do that for you?

The truth is, AI won’t do that for you. AI can’t do your thinking for you. Or maybe it can, but, yikes, what a world in which we surrender our thinking to machines (or maybe we already have?).

That student from the fall is, I know, just the tip of the iceberg. Who knows how many other students are using AI in my classroom in ways I haven’t yet detected? This semester, there will be more AI papers. The floodgates have opened and they won’t be closing again.

When I get the next AI-written paper, I’ll respond with a shrug, because what other choice do I have? It’s sad that this is where we are, but there’s also so little I can do about it. I can have conversations with students about the nature of learning and what exactly it is they’re doing in a college classroom, which I do. I can explain to them why writing a paper might be useful and important, which I also do. I can make assignments that actually are useful and important to their learning as well as, I don’t know, maybe a little fun?

But I’m one voice in a world that in so many ways is really against thinking and therefore also against writing. That reality makes me angry in a way my students’ AI-written papers never will.

1. For example, as I wrote that paragraph about students choosing to be at college, I had to think long and hard about whether that was really true. Did my students choose to come to college? Did they choose the type of college they came to? The student who used AI to write the paper in sociological theory was not a sociology major or a minor. I had the distinct sense that they’d heard this was an easy class and they were trying to get the correct number of credits to graduate. Did they make a choice or not? Also, do students even believe anymore that what happens in college classrooms is valuable or important? There are moments when I’m not sure this is actually true any longer. There are moments when I suspect that college is a box they’d like to check and when I make the checking of that box complicated  or difficult in any way, they’re quite resentful. My point, though, is that all of these are thoughts I did not have until I sat down to write them out.