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AI-assisted writing is close to becoming as standard as spell check. Here's the catch
This op-ed was originally in the LA Times. Jane Rosenzweig is the director of the Writing Center at Harvard.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/opinion-ai-assisted-writing-close-103055423.html
-snip-
Writing is hard because the process of getting something onto the page helps us figure out what we think — about a topic, a problem or an idea. If we turn to AI to do the writing, we’re not going to be doing the thinking either. That may not matter if you’re writing an email to set up a meeting, but it will matter if you’re writing a business plan, a policy statement or a court case.
While AI assistants might be able to help us with our own thinking, it’s likely that in many cases they’ll end up replacing that thinking. In a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Columbia undergraduate Owen Kichizo Terry described using ChatGPT not to edit his own ideas but to generate the substantive components of his college papers, leaving him only to stitch those ideas together. Using AI to generate ideas, create an outline and provide specific instructions for writing each paragraph, Terry wasn’t using an AI assistant; he had become the assistant — and so will we.
Once we let the chatbot fill the blank page, the bot’s text will shape our understanding of the topic — with whatever limitations, biases and errors go with it. To effectively assess AI-generated drafts, we’ll need to be able to ask difficult questions, analyze evidence, consider counterarguments — in other words, to do the same important work we do when we write ourselves. But if we no longer value doing our own writing — if every time we open a Google or Word document, we’re prompted to save time by turning to the bot — we may get to the point when we don’t know how to think for ourselves anymore. Even if we don’t lose our jobs to AI, we’ll lose what matters about them.
I drafted multiple versions of this essay before I got to the version you’re reading now. I didn’t use an AI assistant because I was not interested in finding out what an algorithm would predict someone could say about this topic. I wanted to figure out what was troubling me about it.
-snip-
Writing is hard because the process of getting something onto the page helps us figure out what we think — about a topic, a problem or an idea. If we turn to AI to do the writing, we’re not going to be doing the thinking either. That may not matter if you’re writing an email to set up a meeting, but it will matter if you’re writing a business plan, a policy statement or a court case.
While AI assistants might be able to help us with our own thinking, it’s likely that in many cases they’ll end up replacing that thinking. In a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Columbia undergraduate Owen Kichizo Terry described using ChatGPT not to edit his own ideas but to generate the substantive components of his college papers, leaving him only to stitch those ideas together. Using AI to generate ideas, create an outline and provide specific instructions for writing each paragraph, Terry wasn’t using an AI assistant; he had become the assistant — and so will we.
Once we let the chatbot fill the blank page, the bot’s text will shape our understanding of the topic — with whatever limitations, biases and errors go with it. To effectively assess AI-generated drafts, we’ll need to be able to ask difficult questions, analyze evidence, consider counterarguments — in other words, to do the same important work we do when we write ourselves. But if we no longer value doing our own writing — if every time we open a Google or Word document, we’re prompted to save time by turning to the bot — we may get to the point when we don’t know how to think for ourselves anymore. Even if we don’t lose our jobs to AI, we’ll lose what matters about them.
I drafted multiple versions of this essay before I got to the version you’re reading now. I didn’t use an AI assistant because I was not interested in finding out what an algorithm would predict someone could say about this topic. I wanted to figure out what was troubling me about it.
-snip-
11 replies
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