The Case For Human Writing
From Forbes.com
In the book “More Than Words,” writer-educator John Warner makes the case for renewing the concept of writing as a fundamentally human activity.
Large Language Model bots like ChatGPT offer not intelligence, but automation, he argues. Generative intelligence promises “to turn text production into a commodity.” ChatGPT does not read or think or understand language, but renders words as tokens on which it performs complex math. “When ChatGPT strings together its tokens in the form of syntax, it is not wrestling with an idea. It is arranging language.”
Warner’s concerns go deeper than LLM’s huge and its frequent public mistakes, like the newspaper insert that just last week, included by major newspaper, recommending books that have never been written and cited people who don’t exist (as reported by real humans Damon Beres and Charlie Warzel at The Atlantic). Nor does Warner simply argue that we must circle the wagons and repel the cyber-invaders.
Warner has argued before that much of what LLMs will destroy deserves to be destroyed. We should, he argues, take the advent of chatbots as “an opportunity to reconsider exactly what we value and why we value those things."
Trends in education have taught generations a devalued view of writing (and reading as well). Warner observes that we are on our second or third generation “of students who experience school not as an opportunity for learning, but a grim march through proficiencies, attached to extremely high stakes, stakes often measured by tests that are not reflective of genuine learning.” The result that he has seen in his own classrooms are students who have been “incentivized to not write but instead to produce writing related simulations.” In education, writing has become performance rather than communication, and if we want students to simply follow a robotic algorithm to create a language product--well, that is exactly the task that a LLM is well-suited to perform.
This is my daily struggle. My high school English learners resort to AI to read and write for their classes; my district encourages teachers to use AI to rewrite novels and stories and articles in simplified language so that our English learners with vocabulary sets between 1st and 3rd grade can “access” the high school content. We no longer invest in robust English language acquisition for our learners; we let AI do all the work and our district calls it “humanizing pedagogy” because the English learners are “integrated” into mainstream classrooms as they learn to use a machine to do their work for them. I’m about to get quite loud on this issue as we head, collectively, as fools and cheats, into the avalanche of AI in education.
The loss of literacy that's happened when reading is taught in this way creates a cascade of problems that reach far beyond concerns over test scores. When children have a good foundation in reading and good reading comprehension, it's much more likely they're going to understand and enjoy learning in every subject, not just language arts. What does most studying and learning look like on the most basic level? Exactly like reading, less so for a few subjects but never not at all. Students that do well with reading comprehension enjoy school more and they learn better than students who claim to "dislike" reading. They're more likely to read for pleasure and then it's gets even more interesting. Reading fiction has shown consistently to increase empathy, emotional intelligence, and the ability to imagine the perspectives of others. AI cannot teach this to our kids because as you say, AI isn't reading at all. Looking at the state of our nation and the world at large it doesn't appear to me we're operating under a surfeit of empathy. Empathy, especially in the US, gets treated like something that's worthless and this goes hand in hand with the contempt for knowledge in general we're seeing every day in this administration. No one had to tell me that Trump isn't a reader, it's obvious. It's equally obvious that even the few more intelligent members of his administration might read well enough, but I'm not guessing fiction is something they have any interest in. (They like to create it, it would seem, but then treat it as facts). I wouldn't call Russ Vought illiterate, but I am certain he lacks empathy. Same with the worst people in our government, like Stephen Miller. We need to produce students who grow into adults that can see these types of people for the showboating cruel, narcissists they are. We've always needed citizens capable of seeing and understanding the truth behind lies.