The Exigency — What is the Value of Writing to Students Now That AI Systems Can Write at or above Their Level?

Generative artificial intelligence (GAI) tools can now write as well as most high school students. Some argue, these tools have already reached the point of writing better than undergraduate students. Their scores on standardized texts tend to be in the top 10%, as reflected in this recent Open AI report:

Moving forward, GAI (generative artificial intelligence) systems may be able to write as well as subject-matter experts at the Ph.D. level–and beyond. In his article “Situational-Awareness” Leopold Aschenbrenner, a former researcher/developer at OpenAI, predicts that these systems will be so smart by 2027 that they will be able to do the work that only AI researchers and engineers are now able to do. In time, he hypothesizes these systems will be the smartest intelligence on the planet; they will achieve “superintelligence.” Additionally — and here we invoke The Terminator Series — Aschenbrenner argues that AI systems will no longer need humans to engage in inquiry. Rather, given their programmed thirst for knowledge, they will be solving new problems and creating new medicines, surgical procedures, and ways of knowing without human intervention.

[ For more on superintelligence, see Nick Bostrom’s bestseller, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. ]

Creative Challenge – What is the Value of Writing Without AI?

Writing Prompt

Please consider the following questions, and then write an editorial for your college newspaper on any one of these topics:

• What happens when GAI tools can produce whole essays in the blink of an eye?
• Will students offshore their thinking and creativity to machines?
• What do we lose if we let large language models (LLMs) do all of our writing for us?
• What’s special about human writing? What do we gain by the act of writing?
  • Does the act of writing help us develop thinking, imagination, and ability to communicate? For you, is writing a way of learning about topics or even a way of learning about yourself.
• If students don’t engage in all of the complexities of composing — prewriting, writing, inventing, drafting, collaborating, researching, planning, organizing, designing, rereading, revising, editing, proofreading, sharing or publishing — will their agency, their lives, their identies, be diminished?

Requirements

1. Length: 400 to 600 words. Provide the word count on to the top of the page
2. Use the first person. Avoid vagueness and abstractions. Embrace clarity, simplicity, and coherence.
3. You may use AI for this assignment, but keep your chat logs. Recommended: begin with Perplexity and then try ChatGPT and Claude. Be sure to check any sources. Submitted work with made up sources will receive an FF and will be ineligible for revision, etc.
4. Genre: An essay in the college newspaper. Provide an introduction to your editorial. It’s typical to add a thesis statement or main argument in the introduction but you may also follow an inductive structure if you prefer. Be interesting. Try to make your essay engaging through techniques like humor, vivid examples, and an entertaining writing style. Avoid hyperbole and mistaking opinion for factual evidence. Don’t overgeneralize. These are, after all, new matters that have yet to be researched thoroughly by humanity.
5. Because you are writing an editorial, you do not need to provide formal APA 7 citations. Typically journalists keep those on the side in case they are queried. Still, be sure to address the authority of any evidence you weave into your editorial. Example: Neil Postman, a renowned cultural critic and author of Amusing Ourselves to Death, provides valuable insights into the impact of technology on society, particularly in his address “Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change.”

Schedule

Introduction to the Affordances and Constraints of Generative AI

Given GAI tools can now write as well as they do, do you believe writing produced solely by humans is still necessary — particularly throughout schooling?

Research and scholarship conducted over the past two decades has consistently found that writer’s develop their thinking by writing — that writing is a powerful tool for enhancing learning and creativity:

1. The Writing Process – Research on Composing
   • Discovering Your Unique Writing Process: A Guide to Self-Reflection
   • Problem-Solving Strategies for Writers: a Review of Research
   • The 7 Habits of Mind & The Writing Process
   • The Secret, Hidden Writing Process: How to Tap Your Creative Potential
   • The Ultimate Blueprint: A Research-Driven Deep Dive into The 13 Steps of the Writing Process

Writers, teachers, scholars, researchers — these subject matter experts believe that creativity, learning, thinking, the foundational elements of human agency, are fostered by engaging in writing processes and listening to their intuition, felt sense.

Step 1 – Review of Scholarly Conversations on Affordances and Constraints of Technology

To help you think critically about the affordances and constraints of technologies and their potential impact on literacy practices, please read the following essays:

1. Postman, N. (1998, March). Five things we need to know about technological change [Conference presentation]. Denver, CO, United States. https://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/classes/188/materials/postman.pdf
2. Technoskeptical Framework – 5 Critical Questions about Technology (n.d.). Civics of Technology. https://www.civicsoftechnology.org/curriculum
3. Technoskeptical Framework Handout (n.d.). Civics of Technology. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1gCCh-BGrJQK6rtaNsCpi2BbFjmUy2JlFQBAdHIwHQKg/edit

Recommended Readings

• Felt Sense
• Rhetoric & Apparatus Theory

For this reflection, you may rely somewhat on personal anecdote and self reflection. It’s fine to ground your analysis in your personal experiences as a writer. However, to add depth to your analysis and to spark your imagination, you should briefly review scholarly conversations on this topic. Did you know, for example, that Plato considered writing to be a technology, which he feared would undermine memory and knowledge by allowing people to lean on external memory aids rather than relying on their own memories and thoughts?

In a widely cited speech Neil Postman delivered in 1998, Neil Postman identified “Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change“

1. All technological changes are not only changes of a particular tool, but are also metaphysical changes that alter the way we perceive and codify reality.
2. The advantages of every new technology are always outrageighed by its disadvantages, because every new technology benefits some and harms others.
3. There are always winners and losers in technological change, and the winners will try to persuade the losers that their best interests are served by the change.
4. Technological change is never a one-step affair; it starts a whole new series of other changes which could have been prevented with different choices regarding the original technology.
5. Once a technology is admitted and becomes part of a culture, it plays out its hand; it redefines what we mean by religion, by art, by family, by politics, by history, by truth, by privacy – and so on.

In essence, Postman argues that technologies are not neutral tools, but fundamentally reshape human perception, values, and society in significant ways that create winners and losers. He cautions against simply accepting technological changes without critically examining their broader metaphysical and social impacts.

Postman’s work still informs scholarly conversations about the constraints and affordances of technology, exploring how technological innovations shape human behavior, thought processes, and social structures. This discourse has been advanced by thinkers such as Sherry Turkle, Nicholas Carr, Jaron Lanier, Henry Jenkins and Dennis Baron, who have examined the impact of digital technologies on communication, education, and cultural practices.

In the first paper by the MLA-CCCC Joint Task Force on Writing and AI (2023), Byrd et al., 2023 express five key concerns about allowing students to write with AI:

1. Students may miss writing, reading, and thinking practice because they submit generative AI outputs as their own work or depend on generative AI summaries of texts rather than reading.
2. Students may not see writing or language study as valuable since machines can mimic these skills.
3. Students may experience an increased sense of alienation and mistrust if surveillance and detection approaches meant to ensure academic integrity are undertaken. Such approaches have been proven unreliable and biased; they can produce false positives that could lead to wrongful accusations, resulting in negative consequences for the students.
4. Students may face increased linguistic injustice because LLMs promote an uncritical normative reproduction of standardized English usage that aligns with dominant racial and economic power structures. Worldwide, LLMs may also perpetuate the dominance of English.
5. Students may have unequal access to the most elite tools since some students and institutions will be able to purchase more sophisticated versions of the technologies, which may replicate societal inequalities. The above risks could hurt marginalized groups disproportionately, limiting their ability to make autonomous choices about their expressive possibilities.

Part 2 – Collaborate

Meet in small groups to discuss these questions:

1. Why should aspiring writers ask technoskeptical questions?
2. What does society give up for the benefits of the technology?
3. Who is harmed and who benefits from the technology?
4. What does the technology need? How does AI harm the environment?
5. What are the unintended or unexpected changes caused by the technology?
6. Why is it difficult to imagine our world without the technology?

Part 3 – Deliverables & Submission Guidelines

Upload to Canvas Creative Challenge #1 in .pdf format.