Opinion: Using AI for the 'Hard Part' Is Skipping the Important Part

(TNS) — As I type this, a little gray message keeps popping up. “Help me write,” it offers whenever I pause for a certain length of time. It makes me chuckle, because writing is my job, and then grumble.

I don’t need the help to get started on a writing assignment, but this wasn’t always the case. Even though teachers complimented my writing, I struggled with getting started for years. But I practiced starting, and eventually finishing, writing assignments over and over again until it stopped being so hard.

More than almost any skill I’ve learned to do over the years, I consider getting started my superpower. Now, I’m concerned that fewer people could learn it as ChatGPT and other generative AI becomes a beacon for students who are staring down a blank page on a deadline.

Not wanting to sit at my desk fretting about kids these days, I reached out to local experts in AI and higher education. They too have their eye on the way students use AI in writing assignments. The good news is that instructors are making the potential pitfalls of AI as much a part of the curriculum as its possible uses. It comes down to teaching students the value of being human.

Gareth Barkin, dean of operations and technology at the University of Puget Sound, said professors there have a lot of discretion in how they limit or encourage the use of AI. It’s a balancing act, because writing an original essay or research paper teaches students critical thinking skills. But banning the tools altogether could leave graduates unprepared to work in a world where AI tools are prevalent.

“We don’t want to live in denial and imagine that these tools won’t be available,” Barkin said.

It would be hard to say how much genuine writing ChatGPT and its ilk are replacing, since there have always been ways to get words on the screen without putting much thought into it. When it comes to outright cheating, the difference now is that a software program is doing the writing instead of another student who’s earning some money on the side (RIP to that income stream). There’s also old-fashioned, copy-paste plagiarism, and the dishonorable tradition of “BS-ing” your way through a writing assignment.

The students I’m worried about are the ones who have a spark inside them, but find the process intimidating. Maybe they feel overwhelmed by an assignment that’s asking a lot more of them than they’re used to. Maybe they’re putting a lot of pressure on themselves, and need the courage to start even though the first few drafts won’t meet their own standards.

Barkin’s colleague, Julie Christoff, teaches rhetoric and composition at UPS. She agrees that students lose something by using AI tools to get started, which may be tempting because they’re worried their arguments aren’t strong enough.

“That really short-circuits the thinking process,” she said.
Alternatively, free-writing and brainstorming with other humans can help students discover and refine their own ideas. In addition to making time for students to do these activities, teachers can make it clear during class time that they care about what their students have to say, Christoff said.

Improving is humbling. You have to be at least a little bad at something before you can be competent. Personally, I’ve dealt with a cycle of perfectionism, procrastination and self-loathing. That sounds something like, “I need this piece of writing to be amazing. I’m avoiding starting because the fear of failing is deeply unpleasant. Now I have even less time to make this amazing, it’s my fault, I’m a piece of garbage.” Rinse and repeat.

A little gray message offering to “help” me write might have been all too tempting as I learned to overcome this. And maybe it would have made my life a little better in the short run. There’s an argument to be made for using generative AI to write a first draft that you then write over to include your style, stronger arguments and important details that got left out by the machine.

But most professional writers will tell you that they already do the equivalent of ChatGPT’s job in this scenario. They smash out a first draft, turning off their inner critic as much as they can and getting something on the page. Then they write over it. (Some people claim writing just comes out of them onto the page in its final form. Those people are the worst.)

By making this process an ordinary part of my life, I’ve made huge personal progress in breaking that cycle of procrastination and, frankly, mean thoughts about myself. I still avoid some things that feel extremely important to me, but the level of pain this causes in my life is much lower than it once was.

Barkin points out that students need to learn to push through this process if they’re going to go on to use AI effectively in the workplace. Maybe they’ll need to bring a human eye to something written by ChatGPT, giving it a thorough edit to catch random errors and add nuance and clarity.

You can’t do a good job of editing something written by AI, Barkin said, “until you learn to write convincingly and clearly yourself.”

To do that, you have to get started.

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