Meghan O’Rourke, The Seductions of A.I. for the Writer’s Mind, NYTimes, July 18, 2025.
I’m skipping over a lot of stuff, more than half the article, about how students use it, O’Rourke has used A.I., useless for some purposes, but also about how it’s become her constant intellectual companion, about coming to use the internet as an undergraduate, administrator’s enthusiasm. I found this nugget, “The context here is that higher education, as it’s currently structured, can appear to prize product over process,” which aligns with this quick post of mine: Stop blaming students, a quick note about AI in the schools. And more and more. But this is what I wanted to capture:
The conscientious path forward is to create educational structures that minimize the temptation to outsource thinking. Perhaps we should consider getting rid of letter grades in writing classes, which could be pass/fail. The age of the take-home essay as a tool for assessing mastery and comprehension is over. Seminars might now include more in-class close reading or weekly in-person “writing labs,” during which students can write without access to A.I. Starting this fall, professors must be clearer about what kinds of uses we allow, and aware of all the ways A.I. insinuates itself as a collaborator when a student opens the ChatGPT window.
As a poet, I have shaped my life around the belief that language is our most human inheritance: the space of richly articulated perception, where thought and emotion meet. Writing for me has always been both expressive and formative — and in a strange way, pleasurable.
I’ve spent decades writing and editing; I know the feeling — of reward and hard-won clarity — that writing produces for me. But if you never build those muscles, will you grasp what’s missing when an L.L.M. delivers a chirpy but shallow reply? What happens to students who’ve never experienced the reward of pressing toward an elusive thought that yields itself in clear syntax?
This, I think, is the urgent question. For now, many of us still approach A.I. as outsiders — nonnative users, shaped by analog habits, capable of seeing the difference between now and then. But the generation growing up with A.I. will learn to think and write in its shadow. For them, the chatbot won’t be a tool to discover — as Netscape was for me — but part of the operating system itself. And that shift, from novelty to norm, is the profound transformation we’re only beginning to grapple with. [...]
One of the real challenges here is the way that A.I. undermines the human value of attention, and the individuality that flows from that.
What we stand to lose is not just a skill but a mode of being: the pleasure of invention, the felt life of the mind at work. I am a writer because I know of no art form or technology more capable than the book of expanding my sense of what it means to be alive.
Attention is what we really need:
When I write, the process is full of risk, error and painstaking self-correction. It arrives somewhere surprising only when I’ve stayed in uncertainty long enough to find out what I had initially failed to understand. This attention to the world is worth trying to preserve: The act of care that makes meaning — or insight — possible. To do so will require thought and work. We can’t just trust that everything will be fine. L.L.M.s are undoubtedly useful tools. They are getting better at mirroring us, every day, every week. The pressure on unique human expression will only continue to mount.
One quick thought, subject to reconsideration, it's not the crafting of individual sentences that's important, not for most of us. To be sure, a few people value style and work hard to cultivate it. I suspect that, even in the age of AI, those people will be able to do that. That is, they'll recognize that style interests them and they'll work on it. But for the vast majority of writers, style is a rough and ready business, anything will do, really, as long as the result is clear.
What we need to be concerned about is the overall thought process. How one works with facts and ideas, pulling them from this place and that, kneading them together. How will AI affect that? For I believe that it's in this overall process that humans can, and perhaps always will, outpace any AI. I discuss this in "Searching the Space" at the beginning of this post: ChatGPT evaluates my work over the last two months + a note on search [what AIs can't do].
It's one thing to use AI to flesh out things within a space you are familiar with. Can you learn to use it to move beyond that space, to range over the knowledge sphere in such a way that you make new connections which in turn allows you to lead the AI to new conjunctions?
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