Perhaps pursuing creative writing as an academic field was always a bad idea. Are we members of English departments? When I was an undergraduate, the director of speech and composition enjoyed the university’s three-year MFA program. Aspiring teachers in front of first-year writers was a winning combination of us ignoring throwing art at the wall and students enjoying our honest advice that writing isn’t something you really learn or teach—it’s something you practice.
Until writing courses embraced generative artificial intelligence as sound pedagogy, I always felt at home among my fellow wordsmiths in rhet comp and literature courses. These days, I relate to the buzzkill parents of Ray Bradbury’s short story “The Veldt.” Are my readers, Peter and Wendy, rolling their eyes in disapproval at my old-school AI skepticism? Will they gleefully throw me to the literal lions?
Such thinking tempts me to join the Gen X teaching exodus. Go out on a new road if you can lend your hand; Aren’t our boomer parents singing? Perhaps creative writers are in academia right now for more disruptive reasons than improving enrollment in English departments. Perhaps our departments can learn to accept a strong skepticism of the inappropriate marriage of AI to academic writing.
If you’re tired of the drumbeat of inevitability insisting that English faculty embrace AI in our teaching professions, I’m here to tell you that you’re allowed to disagree. Using the understanding of human writing as a way to allow for-profit technology companies to dismantle the creative practice of human writing is disgusting and unethical. The author has both the agency and the academic freedom to explore the origins of artificial intelligence training for AI and conclude: There is no way to ethically teach AI skills. Not only are we allowed to say no, we have to think deeply about why not.
Are you feeling a little sweaty about the massive power-absorption of AI pulling from the grid and the autonomous direction of a handful of software companies? We are allowed to protest based on the values of environmentalism, criticism of corrupt capitalism and contempt for the mustache-twirling corruption of high-tech global politics.
I encourage humanists to pay attention to the productive arguments for AI outside of academia. The case of Timnit Gebru, who by various accounts was fired/resigned from Google in a dispute with the author of the paper “On the Danger of Stochastic Parrots: Can I Language Models Be Too Big?” it reflects the research, not only of Black scholars, but of those who express strong criticism of the biases of artificial AI.
Additionally, Ed Zitron has sounded economic alarms in recent months, and his newsletter on the possibility of a Silicon Valley bubble burst should be required reading for academics. Incredibly, higher ed abandoned its usual glacial pace for change and revved up the engine to quickly incorporate AI into course writing as an unwanted addition. While many are wringing their hands over the inaccurate software, blaming AI-detection readers (unethical in itself), Three Mile Island will be reopened to wean Microsoft’s worst baby so that its baby teeth can grow into giant chompers, which will require energy . all those bots. After all, Peter and Wendy need help with their English homework. Isn’t that right?
Many well-intentioned educators preface their AI policies with critical acknowledgments about ethics, copyright infringement, privacy concerns, outright lies, biased information, misconceptions and more. Look at the students. Here are the dragons. Let’s think about these arguments that sound abstract for quiet thoughts and prayers. Now please open your newly produced hymn of the week, How to Use But Not Abuse Artificial Intelligencein a chapter titled “Faculty Embraces New Role as Slaves of Doom.” There is another way. For the quiet, pessimistic AI skeptics and Star Trek fans: resistance is not in vain. We don’t have to participate. Let Melville’s Bartleby provide the brat’s motto for our license to resist: “I’d rather not.”
Unpopular opinion: Just because major language models imitate writing does not mean that teaching students how to use them should fall to English departments. Writing is not an insatiable discipline that can be lumped in with all the ed-tech bauble artificial AI attempts to pile onto an already overcrowded tree. AI propagandists counter: Graduates will need AI skills to fully enter the 21st century workforce. They also say that we have a moral responsibility to teach the subject so without our content knowledge it requires the kind of professional development that most universities don’t have the money to fund. Humanities folx, can you even code? The age of corporatespeak enters our modern-day Admin-Fat U and perhaps everyone finally has their wish: Students there is customers.
Regarding customer service, please consider that many students in the creative fields feel similarly trapped in the ivory tower of the Uncanny Valley. They can choose not to read this, too. In fact, many of us good writers and artists who create problems must lead an active, organized fight. Ethics watchers: Pay attention to the PR disaster at NaNoWriMo for a glimpse of how citizen writers are resisting productivity AI. One signal took Gebru’s letter, A View From Somewhereto be published in 2026. He advocates “a future of technology that works for our communities instead of one that is used for surveillance, wars and consolidating the power of a few men in Silicon Valley through data theft, labor exploitation and environmental damage.”
Some of the most eloquent and vulgar anti-AI voices come from the world of science fiction. Do yourself a favor and read Ted Chiang’s excellent opinion piece The New Yorker titled “Why AI Won’t Make Art,” and devote himself fully to bringing out Chuck Wendig’s AI in a hilarious, bombastic way The Terribleminds titled “Generative AI for Writers: An Ongoing (but Unavoidable) Nightmare!” Here’s a reality check about those dubious AI writers: Most of them are out of school. If you’re lucky enough to make a living as a writer, you might wonder what anyone’s provost thinks about AI in the classroom. But it’s important – here at this time – more than ever. Writers, inside and outside the academy, we need your help. Your words.
Your reasons for rejecting AI should not be mine, and they should not be approved by the governing body—in fact, let’s not tell the review committee. Avoid because your job is hard enough without being thrown into a tutorial on how to impress a great developer, an addictive chat bot instructor who speaks Gen Z like BookTok’s favorite boyfriend. Burn the easy AI-generated assignments, because it’s fun to make a bonfire from time to time of everything you thought you knew about teaching and try something completely bananas. Research tells us that engaging, compassionate, playful, relationship-rich teaching works, so use that advantage as a way to counter anyone who accuses us AI opponents and skeptics of being locked into old ways and unwilling to change.
Opposition is not antithetical to progress, and academics who challenge the status quo tend to be more knowledgeable, progressive and diverse in a world of growing, Standard English, oat milk sameness. “Burn it up” is as much a call to action as it is a plea to have fun. The robotics revolution came so quickly on the heels of this pandemic that I think many of us forgot that teaching can be a very enjoyable activity.
Play and present real novels to remind students why reading for fun develops critical learning, empathy and language skills. Bring students into developing new, non-punitive academic honesty policies that acknowledge the truth: We’re all still trying to figure out the post-cheating robot apocalypse. Better yet, model new policies after Asimov’s Three Laws of Robots and toss the legal boilerplate syllabus in the trash where it belongs. Encourage creative writing pedagogy in composition by asking students to write flash fiction, poetry, and quirky short essays instead of easily generated summary responses to required readings.
Students write quality, process-driven work where we simply ask them to avoid AI, to trust their creative instincts and we turn around to provide meaningful, human feedback. Embrace all the fun, inspired strategies you know work in your classroom. Maybe you hate stifling rubrics or annotated bibliographies. Resist. Think outcomes-based assessment can’t capture the synapses of the magic of thoughtful writing? Burn. It. Down. Generative AI pushers are asking us to do the same, and it’s time to reclaim the sense of rebellion born of knowing that this ship is going down either way.
The challenging impact of AI on academic writing is not an anti-technological stance. My sci-fi-loving heart soars at the possibilities for human advancement that AI can achieve in medicine and neurotechnology. Let’s stop wasting all this energy on K-12 AI and college writing homework and help future graduates gain the skills they need to embrace creativity, innovation and creative agency without the help of robots.
OpenAI’s Sam Altman says “no one looks back on the past, wishing they were a lightbulb.” It’s wrong. Carelessness. The Classist. But thanks, Sam, for the unintentionally generous metaphorical name: Lamplighters. I will take it. Personality it does I have the power to use this technology for the betterment of all—this time I share both fear and hope for the future. Yet such a future requires an abundance of early thinkers. Art is hardwired into our brains, and we can’t outsource the thinking or creative actions of a predictive robot that produces a copy of biased, negative and terrible art.
It’s time for the arts and humanities to do better and reveal the truth: Most of us aren’t willing to use AI in our writing work, and we’re not going to push it on the young. What will they do if we build an effective resistance to productive AI, replacing us with robots before we get a hold? Take us out on a parade of clothes to finally finish our own novels? A new backup plan: Teach as the facility collapses, the grid goes down and the spoken word culture is about to make for incredible musical theater—like a comeback. Lights: Choose stories and write poems. Keep throwing art at the wall and see what sticks. Resist AI as if creative writing instruction still mattered, like a Roomba with a rubric app couldn’t teach your class. Keep bringing funk, fun and ambrosia to the party—and never say sorry for being kitschy, weird, and homemade.
Source link
