Educators are grappling with how to approach ever-evolving generative artificial intelligence — the kind that can create language, images, and audio. Programs like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot pose far different challenges from the AI of yesteryear that corrected spelling or grammar. Generative AI generates whatever content it’s asked to produce, whether it’s a lab report for a biology course, a cover letter for a particular job, or an op-ed for a newspaper.
This groundbreaking development leaves educators and parents asking: Should teachers teach with or against generative AI, and why?
Technophiles may portray skeptics as Luddites — folks of the same ilk that resisted the emergence of the pen, the calculator, or the word processor — but this technology possesses the power to produce thought and language on someone’s behalf, so it’s drastically different. In the writing classroom, specifically, it’s especially problematic because the production of thought and language is the goal of the course, not to mention the top goals of any legitimate and comprehensive education. So count me among the educators who want to proceed with caution, and that’s coming from a writing professor who typically embraces educational technology.
Learning to Write Is Learning to Think
At best, generative AI will obscure foundational literacy skills of reading, writing, and thinking. At worst, students will become increasingly reliant on the technology, thereby undermining their writing process and development. Whichever scenario unfolds, students’ independent thoughts and perceptions may also become increasingly constrained by biased algorithms that cloud their understanding of truth and their beliefs about human nature.
To outsiders, teaching writing might seem like leading students
