How Humans Can Use AI to Become Better Writers
Educators should not ban AI outright, but should teach their students how to use it constructively.
Educators are understandably worried about AI. Tools like ChatGPT make cheating easier than ever. In olden times, kids would bully or bribe brainer classmates to do their homework for them. Now, all students have access to brain-bots ready to complete their assignments at their bidding. This is especially an issue for writing assignments. A student only needs to feed the write-o-matic with specifications (the assigned prompt and parameters), and the machine will spit out a made-to-order essay or report. Chatbots can even be instructed to write at a less-sophisticated level and include errors so as to throw the grader off the scent.
Teachers may be tempted to ban AI outright and impose stiff penalties on those who use it. However, such a draconian response is far from ideal. AI isn’t going anywhere. Its use in society—especially in the working world—will only expand. Young people who are denied the opportunity to learn how to use these powerful tools will be at a severe competitive disadvantage in their future careers.
And, at both school and work, AI can be used constructively and responsibly: even for writing. I myself am a professional writer, and I use AI all the time. But, unlike many knowledge-workers who use it to avoid putting in the thought necessary to express themselves, or content “creators” who use it to mass-produce engagement-farming schlock, I use AI to express myself more fully and to improve my abilities as a human writer with my own voice, style, and ideas.
Instead of fobbing off my writing work to the AI, I use it as a junior partner to help me workshop my copy. For example, I will write a “first draft” of a sentence or paragraph completely on my own. Then, if I’m not 100% happy with it, I’ll ask a chatbot to give me a few reworded variations of it. I never use any of the variants in its entirety. But often, the results will include a different word choice that I hadn’t thought of and that makes my own sentence express my meaning more precisely or elegantly. For example, in the original versional of the previous sentence, I used “accurately or eloquently” as the last three words. But when I ran the sentence by an AI, it suggested “precisely or elegantly,” which I realized conveyed what I wanted to say, well, more precisely and elegantly. I didn’t like any of the other changes the AI proposed, but that one rewording made using it worthwhile. Other times, one of the sentences will have a different structure—like starting the sentence with a dependent clause—that will give me an idea for how I can give my prose more variety or a better cadence.
This is no more “cheating” than would be asking your editor or writing coach to help you workshop your copy. And most importantly, it doesn’t cheat myself of the opportunity to grow as a writer. Because I’m actively engaging with the AI’s feedback, using my own taste and discernment to selectively use and improve upon it, I internalize the stylistic techniques that the AI helps me discover and develop, which helps me build my repertoire as a writer.
The best writers in the future will not be those who are forced to forgo using AI entirely, but those who adapt to the new technology by learning how to use it to sharpen their own craft and optimize their own copy. At least as of now, AI generates copy that, while reasonably clear, tends to be dull and stilted. Large language models (LLMs) cannot transcend the quality of the writing on which they are trained. And, because of the dismal state of writing education, that quality is generally very low. Garbage in, garbage out. Mediocrity in, mediocrity out. So, good human writers will not be made obsolete by AI anytime soon. But, humans writers who do not learn how to use AI effectively may very well be made obsolete by human writers who do. So educators—writing educators especially—should not reject AI altogether. Instead, they should first learn how to themselves use AI well and then figure out how to impart that skill to their students.