Students are very busy. In my classes, I ask them to write a fair amount. So I understand why they might be tempted to use large-language generative AI to do their writing.
After all, while using someone else’s work without acknowledgment is plagiarism, will the professor notice that you’re cheating if you’re using AI to cheat?
To address this unspoken question, I am here addressing them and any students tempted to feed their assignments into ChatGPT.
As a professional writer myself, I notice differences in writing style. When the writing sounds like a machine, I notice the difference.
Style conveys a writer’s personality. Your writing has a distinct voice. But AI’s writing style does not. So I notice when your voice disappears from your writing.
Writing is a form of thinking. If you skip the process, what do you learn?
With its sophisticated diction and good grasp of grammar, AI is very good at eloquent BS. However, I also notice when writing is grammatically correct but empty.
That said, as AI gets better and as students get better at using AI, I expect it will become harder to detect its use in my classroom—and in your classrooms, since many of you plan to become teachers.
But consider: Writing is a form of thinking. If you skip the process, what do you learn?
In response to an obnoxious Gemini ad that suggests parents use generative AI to help their children write fan mail, Washington Post Humor Columnist Alexandra Petri abandons humor to ask a serious question: “Do you know what writing is?”
She answers:
It is thinking in a form that you can share with other people. It is a method for taking thoughts and images and stories out of your brain and putting them into someone else’s brain. E.M. Forster quotes a woman saying, “How can I tell what I think until I see what I say?” To take away the ability to write for yourself is to take away the ability to think for yourself.
She’s right.
Practicing writing also teaches you to write better. If you don’t improve your writing, then my class is failing you. It’s not meeting your needs as a student, as a citizen, as a future teacher, or future whatever-work-you-pursue-in-life.
Right now, ChatGPT and other large-language AI are free because they are using you to learn. Or, to put this another way, when you use ChatGPT or other large-language AI models, you are volunteering your time and knowledge to teach it.
But these AI are not always going to be free. If you come to rely on them, how will you cope when you have to pay?
Indeed, how will you cope in real time? As a form of thinking, any writing you do helps you when you are not writing. It’s practice for when you have to improvise, in the world, doing your job.
Also, companies can make AI available for free because they build it on theft. Developers of large-language AI scrape the internet and any text available digitally. And they take it. I learned in the fall of 2023 that they used the text of my biography of children’s writers Crockett Johnson and Ruth Krauss—a book that took me over a decade to write. (It is possible they used others of my work, too. The biography appeared in the dataset obtained by The Atlantic. There are other datasets that I have not seen.)
I did not grant consent for my work to be used to train large-language generative AI. As of this writing, I have received no compensation for my stolen labor.
So a moral question for any who might be tempted by large-language AI: Are you comfortable using a product that is built on the theft of others’ work?
Here’s another moral issue: AI uses as much energy as a small country.
Here’s another moral issue: AI uses as much energy as a small country.
As Brian Calvert writes in a piece for Vox published earlier this year, “OpenAI’s GPT-3, for example, uses nearly 1,300 megawatt-hours (MWh) of electricity, the annual consumption of about 130 US homes.”
He notes that “If ChatGPT were integrated into the 9 billion searches done each day, the IEA [International Energy Agency] says, the electricity demand would increase by 10 terawatt-hours a year—the amount consumed by about 1.5 million European Union residents.”
AI also has a massive environmental impact in other ways. There is the water used to cool the servers that power it, and the water polluted via production of its hardware—via the mining of silicon, germanium, gallium, boron, and phosphorus.
I’m not against new technologies. My mother was a computer programmer in the 1960s and then a computer educator for most of her career. I’ve been using computers since 1979, when my family bought a TRS-80, and I learned to program in BASIC. I launched my website in 1997.
As an early adopter of modern computing technologies, I admire the achievement of generative AI. Indeed, though my mother would disapprove of her son’s work being stolen, I know she would be fascinated by large-language AI and would doubtless have more insightful things to say than I do.
Human beings are not just machines that process information. We ask questions. We dream. We invent. We love. We play. We experience joy and endure pain. We seek justice. We make meaning in a world that often baffles us.
I also realize that large-language AI is here. You may even be required to use it as part of your job. There are some things it does well. It’s good with grammar. It has helped people translate legalese into standard English. It has helped people with learning disabilities parse difficult texts. It has positive, pro-social uses.
But AI is not good at thinking because it can’t. It can imitate. It can borrow from others—often without attribution, which is plagiarism. But it can’t think.
In my classes, I want you to think. And, as your teacher, I want to get a sense of what you are learning, as well as what questions you may have. I want you to develop your minds—that’s the whole point of going to college.
So that is why—unless it is part of the assignment—I ask you to use your brains and not AI’s simulation of thought.
Human beings are not just machines that process information. We ask questions. We dream. We invent. We love. We play. We experience joy and endure pain. We seek justice. We make meaning in a world that often baffles us.
Cultivate a mind that will help you navigate life’s challenges and appreciate its pleasures.
Write.
Read more about AI in Teachers & Writers Magazine:
• “AI in the Creative Writing Classroom: A Conversation on Teaching Writing in a ChatGPT World” by Matthew Burgess, India Choquette, Abriana Jetté, and Darius Phelps.
• “English 110 Versus ChatGPT: Finding a Middle Ground with AI Usage in the Composition Classroom” by India Choquette
• “Alternative Strategies for Artificial Intelligence in the Writing Classroom: An Educator Asks ChatGPT How to Use the Online Chatbot in Writing Classrooms” by Abriana Jetté
Featured photo by Milad Fakurian on Unsplash.

Philip Nel
Philip Nelis University Distinguished Professor of English at Kansas State University and the author or co-editor of 13 books. His next isHow to Draw the World: Harold and the Purple Crayon and the Making of a Children’s Classic, forthcoming from Oxford University Press in November.