A.I., A.I.? Oh!
Let me assure you that I — not A.I. — wrote this column. I feel this statement is necessary after reading a New York Times article titled, “What Do Students Lose When They Stop Writing?”
Writer Dana Goldstein begins with this sobering paragraph: “After years of studying how human beings write, the cognitive psychologist Ronald T. Kellogg concluded that drafting a basic persuasive essay was as mentally taxing as digging a ditch was physically exhausting.”
This statement may seem hyperbolic, but it dovetails neatly with another quote about writing most often attributed to sports columnist Red Smith. Asked if writing a daily newspaper column was a chore, Smith responded, “Why, no! You simply sit down at the typewriter, open your veins and bleed.”
I’ve never bled over a column, but I admit that I sometimes struggle to compose the measly 600 or so words that occupy one. Most often I wait for ideas, which seem to take the scenic route to my brain. And yet I continue to write. But I’ve had lots of practice.
I was about 10 years old when I first sat at my sister’s Smith-Corona typewriter and composed stories for my own amusement. By the time I reached junior high these humorous tales featured school friends as characters. I read the stories to them in the cafeteria at lunch, and we laughed so much that the principal once stopped at our table and grabbed the paper from me. He thought we’d been reading dirty jokes. So I was a writer, even though my English classes didn’t really foster writing.
Then, as a high school junior, I took an elective called “Latin American History.” The course was taught by Ray McQueen, who held a doctorate but nonetheless chose to spend his entire career teaching in our hometown school district. “Doc” was a taskmaster who assigned five essay questions as homework every day. If you failed to do the assignments, he kept you after school and made you finish them under his watchful eye. Most of my classmates moaned about these required essay questions; I never really minded them. I was learning to write, but I was also learning to think.
Yet, ever more frequently, people just don’t want to do either.
In her article, Goldstein says current surveys reveal that somewhere between 66 and 90% of school students are now using A.I. in school assignments. Rather than do the hard labor of researching and writing, students ask A.I. to dig the ditch. And that’s not good.
“Writing builds our working memory, executive planning skills and metacognition — the ability to think about our thinking, weigh alternate viewpoints and revise for clarity and style,” Goldstein opines. “It takes decades to develop writing skills, from toddlerhood into adulthood.”
She’s correct.
If A.I. had been around in 1962 when I wrote those silly stories to entertain my pals, maybe it could have produced something similar. But unless I had prompted A.I. with every poetic, comedic and literary influence I’d developed since birth, what A.I. came up with wouldn’t have actually reflected “me.”
You’ve heard of the “Infinite Monkey Theorem?” It states that an infinite number of monkeys sitting at an infinite number of typewriters and hitting keys at random for an infinite amount of time will eventually produce the works of Shakespeare. That’s A.I. in a nutshell.
Using A.I. to write something doesn’t make you clever, it only makes you appear to be clever. Perhaps you’ll learn something about developing an essay if you take the time to analyze what A.I. coughs up after a prompt. But you also run the risk of not being able to do so on your own.
Goldstein also tells us that in an effort to thwart the use of A.I. by students, teachers have begun to require handwritten essay tests, conducted in class. Literally old-school.
Doc McQueen would be proud.