Thread by @MonicaLMarks

AI is killing the college essay as more profs ditch papers for in-class exams. So now even fewer students are being taught to write well (an energy intensive task!).

Students lose out, bc good writing = good thinking: a training of the brain towards structure, style & substance.

https://twitter.com/variety/status/1986880080664985729

Teaching great writing is probably the pedagogical skill I’m proudest of bc I believe it’s more valuable than practically anything one can learn.

For years, I’ve felt I had it down to a gratifying-as-hell science. I still do & am quick to at sniff out AI.

But there’s a hitch:

This semester, AI reliance finally hit my classrooms like a tidal wave.

There’s a genuinely dehumanizing, dystopian element to it that’s been horrendous to watch.

Brilliant students husked out by robots, like invasion of the body snatchers, numbed & dumbed without realising it.

I meet with my students individually to dissect & burnish a great research question before green-lighting them to embark on any original research paper.

This semester, I’ve had top students who made the great research Q I approved *worse* by reflexively feeding it through AI.

What concerns me about this is that it involves brilliant students, not just lazy or less apt ones. Some are seeming to trust AI reflexively—even more than they trust themselves.

The robots’ hum numbs them to the sound of their original voices.

So to break them of this, truly:

I must prove to them that their voice—the one we’re honing all semester—is more trustworthy than AI.

A project of connecting students w their own humanity. Training & trusting their own muscles to run & dance when hopping in the AI golf cart seems not just easier, but *smarter.*

When I say I work with brilliant students who have this problem now, I mean it.

I’ve smelled AI on essays from Ivy League shoe-ins’ & finalists for famed, globally prestigious awards.

Essays by students I proudly helped bloom into phenomenal writers years ago, well before AI.

Suddenly, I’ll hit a passage that sounds stilted, sterile, and strangely… not them.

It’s like that scene in The Stepford Wives when Katharine Ross sees her old friend in the kitchen & suddenly realizes that she’s become a robot.

It’s eerie as hell.

This August I hung out in NYC’s standup comedy scene & ticked a major item off my bucket list by performing for the first time in the Village.

Lots of comics, new & established, joked abt how they were getting AI-written messages on *dating apps.*

Some real Stepford Wives shit!

But unlike Katharine Ross & Paula Prentiss, who at least knew one another as humans before Paula’s robot-ification, these AI daters are—from the very first message they send to the person who could someday become their spouse—speaking in a machine’s voice.

Not their own.

I’m pro-technology & see a whole universe of wonderful applications for AI.

Convincing my budding star writers & Hinge daters that its voice is better, stronger, or more reliable than their own is not amongst those applications.

We will adapt, surely. But we will also atrophy.

Students already get a raw deal from many unis .

Decades worth of debt, a predatory student loan industry, profs who indoctrinate w/ jargon—often making students worse writers—who craft dry & miserably pedantic academic articles that not even their colleagues read pleasurably.

In my entire university career, I never had a professor who really helped elevate my writing. Most slapped As on my work without edifying feedback. One (I love her to this day) did better by giving me a C on my first draft & flagging my “purple prose.”

I understand why, though.

It’s time consuming. Profs are rarely hired or tenured bc they help students metamorphose into writer-butterflies.

They’re hired & tenured for writing work that, w alarming frequency, desiccates fascinating topics of their juice & accessibility.

We lose our voices this way, too

The addition of AI is the straw that breaks this already wearied camel’s back.

A multiple choice Scantron is faster to grade than anything written. And a short answer test in a blue book is often faster to grade than an essay—esp if you have to scrutinise said essay for AI.

Sussing out AI pivots on subjective feeling derived from vaguely telltale patterns & from disjunctures btw a student’s natural voice & AI’s voice.

Room for error is high. And learning a student’s “natural voice” is hard if you’ve got large classes or never saw their raw writing.

You can see why profs would say “screw it” & switch to multiple choice or short response exams.

The prospect of litigating bad grades for AI plagiarism can also be daunting. Grade inflation makes students likelier to complain to admin abt grades (as they should when it’s unfair)

So the easy way out—which also happens to be the smartest career move for professors, given how twisted incentive structures typically are—is to save themselves the hassle & essentially give up.

Scantrons: in. Tediously coaching students to write well: out (if it was ever in).

I fear that—by doing even less to coach students toward composing juicy, well-structured, methodologically rigorous work of their own—unis will offer them less in return for debt-crippling degrees.

The incentive structures are wildly awry to equip us well for this challenge.

Maybe I sound like I’ve reached the “crotchety 30-something who kvetches about kids’ newfangled tchotchkes” stage 🤣

But I encouraged AI’s intelligent use (much as we use Google or Siri, for ex, i.e. as tools to sift rather than legs to stand on) years ago when it was brand new.

What I fear for the first time now, though, is a world where even my best writers think, in the back of their heads, that AI might say it better. Paint it better. Sing it better.

Where my Olympians hobble on crutches needlessly.

Where we become holograms of ourselves.

I don’t fear a world where AI codes, translates, or extracts factual needles in informational haystacks a trillion times faster than I could. Give me those tools ASAP.

But I want to drive & keep my students driving. I don’t want them doubting or unlearning their ability to drive

I want to hear & read art in our words. Our art.

I want to recognise & aspire to true talent. To write as wittily as Hitchens, as hauntingly as Stephan Zweig, as intoxicatingly as Nizar Qabbani, bc I’ve honed my soul in the shape of greatness.

Not because I’ve clicked a button.

Robbing students of the ability to write well robs them of the ability to understand themselves & their own views better.

Before writing this 🧵, I reread the late Kurt Vonnegut’s letter to high schoolers who’d asked him for advice.

His second paragraph hits at the crux of it.