Those of us who teach writing for a living have long had to contend with students who, for whatever reason, fail to complete the assigned reading. They forgot. They do not have the book. They were just too busy. The list of reasons is long. I even once had a student claim that she could not do the reading because, and I quote, “her poodle exploded.” You can’t make this stuff up. This particular challenge faced by educators throughout the ages is common enough; however, new onto the scholastic scene is the prevalent use of artificial intelligence or AI for short to complete writing assignments. There are, I understand, a variety of so-called “BOTS” or writing programs, but ChatGPT seems to be the most widely used. As of today, its use cannot be detected. A student inputs some topic into the program and then it very quickly spits out suggestions: sentences, entire paragraphs, content whose word count can be predetermined by the user. Students use this to save time, sound more sophisticated, and even circumnavigate the writing process. Why spend hours crafting a paper when you can crank it out in five minutes and still go to the party?
What is amazing about this new presence in academia is that students genuinely believe that what they quote/unquote “wrote” is theirs. They put in the search term, and they made the selections. That was their contribution, and they, therefore, feel perfectly fine slapping their name into the header, claiming the work to be entirely original. The result? Now we are graduating students who neither read nor write. These are students who learned how to check boxes, cheat the system, and receive the sheepskin all in the name of landing a high-paying job. Money is the driving force, not learning for its own sake. And we wonder why our society’s ills are only getting worse...
To the people of light, however, there is a Creator God who made us in his image. I have wondered if we have taken the word “image” too literally over the years. Perhaps the definition needs to be expanded to include the nature of God to create. We create, in other words, because God first created. We paint, we sculpt, we design, we build, we color inside the lines and out, we create babies and families and eventually legacies, and we also write. In the beginning was the Word, after all. God is the ultimate wordsmith – the grand and good author of all.
What, then, do we give up when we lazily walk away from the process? Do we write to solely produce content, or do we also write to participate in a transformative act?
It seems that the current culture wants to arrive at the destination immediately without considering the importance of the journey. In our present age of on-demand, made your way, custom fit everything, the notion of going through any process seems unnecessary at best and laborious at worst. I have even heard of individuals sending scribbled down notes to more accomplished writers for them to compose, for a fee, of course, master’s theses and dissertations. We should be wary about who we call doctor, to be sure. All of this is to say that the crisis – and it is just that – is not so much one characterized by sloth and distraction as one characterized by a willful surrender of the quality that makes us creatures of the Creator, which is to say fully human in the way we were meant to be just that. AI, if we let it, diminishes us in ways that have yet to be realized. Just as cell phones have demonstratively increased anxiety, loneliness, and depression, so too will AI rob us of a significant part of our humanity. This claim is not hyperbole. When I read a student submission and discover right away that the student likely had little to do in the composition of the paper, deferring the bulk of it to some sophisticated algorithm, I am saddened by the reality that the student forfeited the opportunity to wrestle with an idea, articulate some conclusions, and, in the process, become more of what he or she was meant to be. An impressive-sounding essay is not always the goal. The aim, more times than not, is to positively shape the mind of the learner through a deep and profound process. Otherwise, the educational system will not produce critical, independent thinkers but automatons who are excellent consumers of streaming services, yes-men and women whose worlds are determined by the scripted choices they are given by the powerful and worldly.
