Kaitlyn Parker
9/15/24
WRI 101
Suzanne Churchill
AI: A Thieving Tragedy
I didn’t understand the point of AI when it began to grow in popularity. One Thanksgiving, in my grandma’s living room, my uncle and I started talking about AI’s purpose. He gushed about how AI was going to change the world and expedite productivity. In his opinion, it was vital for me to learn how to use it early. Throughout the conversation, I was confused. As a student who didn’t want to get caught plagiarizing an essay, I thought I had no use for AI. It seemed like a dangerous, slippery slope. How could AI help people like me? Realistically, it can’t. AI can easily become a threat that strips us of our ability to grow in our writing skills because of the enticing shortcuts that it offers to users. My uncle is right. AI is growing in popularity and continues to become an integral part of our world. But just as I thought in my grandma’s living room years ago, our use of AI comes with significant negatives.
Why is AI destined to fail? People enjoy the easiest avenue. Why crawl to the top of a mountain when you could stroll down a street instead? With a few sentences, you can generate an essay that might be better than something you could write yourself. From the student drafting an essay to the corporate worker writing a memo, people fall prey to using AI as the easy way out. For my bioinformatics class, our teacher created a custom coding coach on ChatGPT to help us learn and write better python code. When I heard our class uses AI, I was shocked. Why would our teacher put the answers right at our fingertips? Well, the truth is, the coding coach is very helpful. As the students, we have to decide how much help we want and how much we want to learn by iterating. However, that temptation to finish an assignment quickly, get a memo out to your corporate team, or write an email is a shiny and flashy one. Kyle Chayka discusses this idea in his article, My A.I. Writing Robot by commenting, “As writers, we are all prone to falling into lazy patters; avoiding them requires active effort” (3). It is difficult to avoid the pitfall of using AI incorrectly. As a student, it’s hard to use my coding coach without allowing it to do my homework. And as writers, it’s hard to use AI to help our writing without abusing its power.
But why should we worry about using AI to take shortcuts? Anything worth reading required a vast amount of effort, struggle, failure, and perseverance (Chiang, 3). AI robs us of logically thinking through what we want to write, and it hinders our creativity to express our ideas in an individual voice. Ted Chiang, in his article Why A.I isn’t Going to Make Art expertly expresses his idea by saying, “The companies promoting generative-A.I. programs claim that they will unleash creativity. In essence, they are saying that art can be all inspiration and no perspiration – but these things cannot be easily separated” (2). The battle to create art through words helps us write something good in the moment and write something even better in the future. Kyle Chayka piggybacks off Chiang by saying, “Writing without the aid of a generative machine might be frustrating, even excruciating, but it does encourage productive logic”. The rewrites, the edits, and the mental struggle are all integral components to writing something worthwhile. Even using AI to write an outline or expand on an idea robs us because the mistakes we make along the way are necessary to creating the finished product. Megan O’Gieblyn perfectly expands on this when she says, “The perfect word [is] always less interesting… than the one you stumbled on while groping around in the dark”. AI could potentially become the new easy way out – from students writing essays to lawyers writing legal cases. If society collectively begins to turn away from allowing ourselves to wrestle with our writing, we will lose valuable, necessary skills. We will ruin our chance to grow through the struggle.
From thanksgiving conversation to global debates, AI sparks controversy. Although many people fervently favor AI’s widespread use, we also have to consider the serious drawbacks. As humans drawn to ease and comfort, the temptation to trust ChatGPT as your thoughts and innovation is strong. What will happen to our world if we let AI become the norm and creative human writing becomes the rare jewels to hunt down and find? Let’s not find out.
Works Cited
Chayka, Kyle. “My A.I. Writing Robot.” The New Yorker, 11 July 2023, www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/my-ai-writing-robot. Accessed 26 Aug. 2024.
Chiang, Ted. “Why AI Isn’t Going to Make Art.” The New Yorker, 31 Aug. 2024, www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/why-ai-isnt-going-to-make-art. Accessed 04 Sept. 2024.
O’Gieblyn, Meghan. “Babel.” N+1, 2021, www.nplusonemag.com/issue-40/essays/babel-4/. Accessed 25 Aug. 2024.
Special shoutouts:
I had a wonderful conversation with Suzanne Churchill during her office hours about my essay on September 13th.
I used The Writer’s Diet tool to hone my essay.
I also used ChatGPT to find sentences in passive voice by asking ChatGPT to return my essay to me with those sentences in bold (we did this activity in class).
Honor Code Pledge:
“Pledge” KRP