This article on students using of generative AI in the creative task of writing is absolutely worth reading, especially if you’re a teacher or lecturer. The writer Micah Nathan demonstrates an important tension regarding what it means to be human in the world of AI. He rightly states that the value of written assignments “lies not only in the object produced but in the transformation that occurs during its making.” In other words, learning really is a spiritual discipline that AI cannot replicate. By short-circuiting the process of learning, one short-circuits their soul. One cannot experience transformation —at least not in the positive sense of the term.
A Moral Question
When confronted with the reality of AI usage in his workshop, Nathan told his class, “the workshop couldn’t proceed because I won’t give feedback to an author who doesn’t exist.” This is the correct response!
After an awkward silence, a teary confession ensued:
one of the ostensible authors said she only used AI because she was scared of looking stupid, of being criticized for bad writing. She said she loved writing stories and hated having used AI. But she couldn’t stop herself, recounting a sequence similar to an addict’s descent.
Other student responses were telling. A few examples suffice: “Why [is it] bad for AI to write stories as long as the stories are based on [the student’s] ideas?”; “How [is] using AI … different from using a human editor?”; “Isn’t AI meant to make everyone’s life easier? Less stressful?” The brave student’s confession and other students’ subsequent questions hit at issues of personal and spiritual formation. They are moral questions. Each student’s inner lawyer is looking for an out; for any reason why it’s okay to take the short cut regarding their creative endeavours.
I’m therefore bemused when Nathan states the following:
This is a pedagogical position, not a moral or technical one. The workshop only works if there’s a writer in the room, someone whose thinking is visible on the page, and who can speak directly to that thinking. Using AI to write not only nullifies the entire peer review concept—we’re here to workshop each other, not to workshop AI slop—it also guarantees a weakening of the muscles needed to wrestle with writing.
However, the student’s confession and the various responses that followed (including from Nathan himself!) give the game away. Of course it is a moral issue. More than that, it’s a human issue.
A Human Question
Outsourcing one’s thinking to a machine is ultimately dehumanising. In the classroom, I beg for the one thing the student can give me: their true self. Anyone can give me generic data. But when I ask a student to put something on the page, I’m actually asking for something of their soul. ChatGPT can’t do that; Claude can’t do that; because machines can’t do that. Nathan is right on this point and so he now puts the following on his workshop intel page:
I don’t want students using AI to write … I want access to their thinking, their voice, their struggles to find what they want to say and the best way to say it. I want to see what happens when someone tries to move through language without an intermediary finishing the thought.
Yes and Amen!
But as I said above, this is not a mere pedagogical issue. The very task of writing is soul formation, and that is why the use and misuse of AI is a moral issue. To outsource the process of good thinking and good writing is to embark on a journey that runs the risk of deforming one’s soul.
Paradoxically, the first student’s guilty response showed they knew at a heart level something was not right in the manner they executed their project, yet the subsequent questions suggest the class didn’t realise just how much they’re giving up, especially in the sense of their capacity to think and reason clearly. By contrast, Nathan is very much aware of this reality and is working hard to ensure his students don’t fall into an “addict’s descent”.
Clearly the use of AI has a cost that we’re only now beginning to grapple with, and when I first tweeted about this article, one commenter, Esther, correctly identified the profundity of the issue: “Having made gods of productivity and efficiency, of not falling or failing, we have settled to become something lesser.”
In pursuing speed and efficiency over patient discipline, we rob ourselves of the positive formative aspects that creative endeavours such as thinking and writing can bring, and we are lesser (and more vulnerable!) humans for it. There is no doubt the digital age has its advantages, but GenAI brings with it costs with which we are yet to truly reckon.
