I have mostly ignored the AI-panic on the teacher socials because early on John Warner wrote “ChatGPT Can’t Kill Anything Worth Preserving” and that resonated with the direction of my thinking. I’ve always thought authentic teaching practices were the best immunization against outside threats of cheating whether it is buying/borrowing the work for others to pass off as your own (plagiarism) or getting a robot to do your work for you.
The truth is that desperate stressed people make bad decisions. If you are an instructor that assigns a high-stakes writing assignment without providing the necessary supports for your students to produce that assignment then you are creating the perfect conditions for desperate stressed students to make bad decisions (like feeding your prompt into AI). If you are an instructor that assigns disposable writing then you are creating the perfect conditions for uninspired students to turn to AI.
Many teachers I know are focused on enforcing their way out of this problem (students attempting to pass AI work off as their own). There is much discussion of the ways to catch and prove AI use so that students can be punished or even blacklisted. While the best educators focus on using suspected AI use as a teachable moment, I think we are never going to win an AI enforcement war. Our only hope is to deter our students from this destructive path by providing good writing instruction.
There is also much discussion about teaching our students to work with AI and I think that is a mistake. Why encourage our students to feed still more of their blood, sweat, and tears into the maw (and pockets) of capitalist techbros? Our only responsibility here is to lay bare the many weaknesses and exploitations of AI then compare the technology with the beauty and joy of imperfect human creations (if possible created with only the simple technologies of pen and paper). If you think AI poetry is good then you are not reading enough human poetry (repeat with every other writing form).
So what is a writing teacher to do in the age of AI? Build community, be real, and guide the writers in your care on the sometimes perilous and sometimes joyful journey of writing. The truth is that the advent/rise of AI changes nothing about the basics of teaching writing. If you create a community of writers with writing as the centerpiece of your work together then you will reduce the lure of AI. If you regularly engage the writers in your care in authentic writing then you will lower the temptation to fall down the path of AI. If you show your students how to be writers engaged in real writing tasks by being their guide on this journey then you may just save your students from falling prey to AI.
I do not claim to have all the answers, but I’ve been teaching writers and writing teachers for decades and these recommendations are based on real life conversations with my students and colleagues. The solution to AI’s entry into the writing classroom is not hysteria but a return to the writing workshop. Know your students, know their writing, and create a community where your students know the writing of their peers (because you write together as a community) and slay the AI monster together.
Image by Bluehouse Skis from Pixabay
