Does Writing Have to Be Hard?
American writing instruction has always involved some level of torture. What happens when technology makes it easy?
TL;DR
- The author, a history professor, felt threatened by the arrival of AI chatbots and delivery droids, seeing them as symbols of "frictionless ease" and potential civilizational collapse.
- He defends the traditional view of writing instruction in the humanities, which emphasizes writing as both a craft and an art that requires sustained effort to yield insight.
- Historical anxieties about the decline of writing standards and clear thinking, dating back to the late 19th century, resurface with the advent of AI tools.
- The author observed that AI tools initially produced "weird" student writing, but eventually led to smoother, more uniform, and less error-prone essays, yet also less unique or profound ideas.
- He concludes that the hard work of writing, despite its "torture," is essential for the formation of a thinking mind and that messy, handwritten essays revealed more alive thoughts than AI-generated text.