https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/08/ai-in-the-writing-classroom-professor-beware/
Generative artificial intelligence has no role in the walled garden of teaching a student how to write.
For nearly three decades, I’ve had the privilege of teaching media writing to generations of undergraduate and graduate students at Boston University’s College of Communication, helping them week after week to steadily acquire the skills they need to embark on successful careers. However, two years after the arrival and wider use of generative AI, it’s inarguably clear that, at every level of education, these tools represent nothing short of an existential threat to the writing classroom — undercutting the very way we formulate, develop, and express our intelligence.
Although I needn’t rehearse all of the many statistics describing the obvious decline of writing and literacy in our society, the temptation is too great. Last fall, Joseph Pisani grimly noted in the Wall Street Journal, “the average score on the ACT dropped to a new 30-year low, indicating fewer high-school seniors are ready for college.” That lamentable decline aligns with other research showing the number of teenagers who read for pleasure dropping steadily over the past 40 years, while the number of teens who rarely or never read for fun climbed from 8 to 29 percent.
Since writing instructors can confirm that the best way to learn writing is to read voraciously, it’s clear that we instructors already face a steep climb, competing with distractions ranging from TikTok and Snapchat to Netflix and the latest smartphone games. We already have a generation that refuses or is unable to read. Do we now want them unable to write, as well?
Ask virtually any college writing instructor today and you’ll get some variation of issues about student performance: an inexplicable unwillingness to read (either compulsorily or voluntarily), an inability to properly compose sentences that rise above the most pedestrian of structures (at best), or a crippling overreliance on writing and grammar tools whose scope only increases. Those concerns are now exponentially magnified.
With the arrival of gen AI in late 2022, my colleagues and I have been facing a game-changing inflection point: the increasing inability to accurately assess an individual student’s writing talent — their ability to create, develop, and express original thoughts in clear, compelling, audience-centric ways. Even in the face of clear policies prohibiting the use of gen AI in our classes, we now face an onslaught of prefab essays brazenly churned out in seconds by time-pressed, shortcut-seeking students eager to get their tickets punched before moving down the path to their degrees.
