If a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?
If a student uses ai to write and no one notices, does it matter?
I'll admit: I find it difficult to ask that last question, as a former journalist here at EdSurge who built his career on writing. But ai writing is proliferating across all professions. Marketers use it for advertising copy; financial analysts for synthesizing information. More than tech-Generative-ai-Survey-Research-final.pdf” target=”_blank” rel=”noopener nofollow”>4 out of 5 teachers I have used ChatGPT. Even in industries with strict standards for human originality, ai is advancing. The winner of a prestigious Japanese literary award used ChatGPT to write part of his novel.
Just as the technological tools of the business world—laptops, smartphones, and the Internet—have come to classrooms, so has generative ai. And if one of the goals of school is to prepare children for the future life, how can we prepare them for this new world, especially while students' writing proficiency remains concerning? Last year, nearly half of Texas fourth graders scored a zero on the state written composition test.
When innovative technologies enter schools, old skills and habits give way to new ones. Some may not go over our heads, such as cursive writing. Other conveniences come at a cost: Typing on keyboards has largely replaced handwriting, although research shows the latter is better for memory and learning (and for carpal dexterity). Print reading improves understanding more than digital text, although today our eyes are fixed on screens.
So what do we gain and lose when students use artificial intelligence to write?
There is a very real risk here: They may begin to rely on generative ai to the extent that it completely replaces their way of thinking.
For many people writing is the most brutal thought exercise. It reflects and tests our assumptions, pushing us to refine our ideas and discover new ones. It takes us down rabbit holes that we have to get out of. It requires us to connect the dots and think about what makes sense and what doesn't, transition between ideas and evidence, and consider what makes sense and what doesn't.
When ai is used as a shortcut, we lose some of these muscles, no matter how painful it is to develop them. For young, developing writers, this can be a big setback.
However, not all parts of the writing process have to be equally stressful. For students who write to develop their thinking, for example, style should be less of a concern than substance. Many times we worry more as we want to say something before we know that we mean.
At Carnegie Mellon University, a team of English teachers have proposed using the concept of “constrained generative ai” to develop tools for teaching writing. This approach involves building guardrails that help students focus more on higher-order thinking and the core of their arguments, and worry less about precise sentence construction. One feature, for example, converts students' notes into rough prose without inserting ideas or opinions, so that the quality of the prose reflects the quality of the notes. It is a novel concept that has potential to help younger students if the “ai constraint” can be aligned with grade-level writing standards.
However, each small metacognitive act of constructing a sentence reflects valuable thought. Knowing how to use conjunctions, for example (ifs, buts, and therefore) is an important exercise in logical reasoning. How much should we outsource that to ai? Too much, and the writing experience can feel like a fill-in-the-blank exercise like MadLibs.
Mastering the mechanics of writing and crafting strong arguments requires not only practice, but also guidance. The most formative learning experiences occur when teachers help students work through their knots and help them find those “aha!” Moments when everything clicks. But time (or rather, the lack of it) naturally limits how much feedback they can provide and how many writing cycles they can go through.
Here's one way ai can help write instructions: Shorten the amount of time it takes teachers to give feedback throughout the writing process (planning, writing, revising, editing, publishing) so that students no longer have to wait days or weeks before knowing if they are on track correct. Some tools allow teachers to establish a rubric that guides grading and feedback provided by ai. The idea is that the ai can handle some basic feedback (about grammar, syntax, diction) so that teachers can focus on other important areas.
However, there are limitations: A recent study on ChatGPT found that it “can function comparably to a human in assigning a final holistic score for a student essay, but has difficulty identifying and evaluating the structural pieces of argumentative writing.”
This underlines the importance of teachers in the process. While ai may be able to give good feedback based on a rubric, excellent Feedback takes into account a broader context about a student's background, knowledge, and experiences—things that ai would have a hard time knowing better than teachers.
ai raises many existential questions for education, and today it is reasonable to ask: “Was this assignment written by ai?” There are many cases of lazy copy and paste, not only in tasks and ai/?sh=3d527d025299″ target=”_blank” rel=”noopener nofollow”>college admission essaysbut in academic research also. The reality right now is that our human ai lie detectors are already on high alert, with or without the help of digital ai detection tools.
But that question could soon prove as anachronistic as asking whether someone used the Internet for help.
“Why would a student use ai to write this?” It's a better question for teachers than, “How did you interact with the ai during the process?” Just as we want students to verify information they find on the web, they will need the skills and confidence to question, evaluate and refine what ai produces. This is the next frontier in media and digital literacy.
Teaching these skills will be an important task for teachers, and they are well prepared for it. With their help, students can learn to incorporate ai in thoughtful ways that preserve human thought and agency.
