Essay 1 Revised

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.

AI poses a dangerous threat because people will always choose the easiest avenue. Why crawl to the top of a mountain when you could stroll down a street instead? With AI, its alarmingly easy to 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. I can give it my code and ask it how to fix my errors, and it will give me tips. However, this robs my brain from logically thinking through where my code is failing. As the student, I have to decide how much help I want and how much I want to learn by trying.  Kyle Chayka a freelance journalist, comments, “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? By using AI in any step along the writing process, people remove the ability to grow necessary writing skills. 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, an expert in AI technology, expresses, “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 shares a similar view to Chiang. She says, “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 expands by saying, “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. 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.

As I’ve been writing this essay, I’ve wondered what I would say to my uncle the next time we talk about AI. Although I agree that AI is growing, I would emphasize the negatives that are linked to its use. I know I won’t become a better coder by letting ChatGPT tell me the answers to my coding errors. I also know I won’t become a better writer if I let it be my thoughts and innovation. And I also know that our world will not be better off if we let AI become the norm and creative human writing become the exception. So, let’s use AI with caution.

Works Cited

O’Gieblyn, Meghan. “Babel.” N+1, 2021, www.nplusonemag.com/issue-40/essays/babel-4/. Accessed 25 Aug. 2024.

Acknowledgments

I had a wonderful conversation with Suzanne Churchill during her office hours about my essay on September 13^th. We talked about how my original draft had lots of different opinions, so we discussed how I could make my essay more focused around one idea. She also encouraged me to lean more into talking about my personal experience with AI.

I used The Writer’s Diet tool to hone my essay. It helped me find unnecessary clutter words like pronouns or be verbs. This was useful for me to help make my essay more clear and concise.

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).

url link: https://chatgpt.com/share/e/66fd9471-01ac-8000-b2db-bff83c8cce0b

drafting groups comments:

Alston:

I really enjoyed reading your essay! The introductory paragraph added a lot of personality to the piece. One suggestion I might have is to attempt to add a clear thesis earlier on in the piece so that the reader can follow your argument from the start. One suggestion I have is thinking about splitting up the 3rd paragraph because you cite a lot of experts. You could structure it by splitting the first paragraph to include Chiang and Chayka, then respond to them with your own ideas. Then do a separate paragraph with a different topic sentence using O’Geiblyn as the expert and respond to her. I like how you bring back your introductory narrative to the conclusion. Overall I like your argument and how you developed it. I thought your rhetorical questions were a good tactic to provoke the reader to reflect.

Eva:

Hi Kaitlyn! I think we touched on most things during our tutorial today, which I really enjoyed! I love how you start your essay of with a personal conversation/debate! And I also like how your sentences are varying from long to short ones, makes it really easy to read through! In your first paragraph you used a personal experience with AI which is really good!
In your conclusion I think you could end on a more personal note, just like how you started your essay! Maybe go back to the conversation you had and underline the “I say” part in the conclusion?
Other than that, I really enjoyed reading it! Thank you!

Honor Code Pledge:

“Pledge” KRP