This is *Not* the Way

There are people out there scrambling -- scrambling, mind you -- to find ways to use generative artificial intelligence for good. I concede there may be good uses for the technology out there, but on the surface it appears what two professors at Carnegie Mellon University is not the approach we should take.

Writing is messy. It can be difficult, even for seasoned writers. But writing is a muscle that improves with use and use and use, and I'm not convinced "lightening the cognitive load" in the early stages of writing by having artificial intelligence write for us is the way to go.

It all comes down to approach, I suppose. If the students these professors have are looking at what artificial intelligence writes and learning from it, really dissecting it, I suppose that works. But the same can be accomplished through examples of non-AI writing and a lot of practice.

What I fear with AI is that students will see that easing of the cognitive load and not learn anything from it but how to manage AI prompts to get what they need. The skills in writing don't develop naturally as students continue to take the easy, AI way out of writing problems.

From the article on EdSurge:

A key feature of their new tool is called “Notes to Prose,” which can take loose bullet points or stray thoughts typed by a student and turn them into sentences or draft paragraphs, thanks to an interface to ChatGPT.

“A bottleneck of writing is sentence generation — getting ideas into sentences,” Ishizaki says. “That is a big task. That part is really costly in terms of cognitive load.”

In other words, especially for beginning writers, it’s difficult to both think of new ideas and keep in mind all the rules of crafting a sentence at the same time, just as it’s difficult for a beginning driver to keep track of both the road surroundings and the mechanics of driving.

“We thought, ‘Can we really lighten that load with generative AI?” he says.

I think AI has roles in generating outlines and assisting with brainstorming -- as long as users are willing to look at what AI offers with a critical eye and does the rest of the work without assistance.

Any AI-related shortcut, I fear, will become just that: a shortcut, taken every time a writing problem arises, without developing the underlying skill the shortcut eliminates. I've written about that before, and I think this example coming from the programming world beautifully illustrates the uses and pitfalls AI brings to writers. AI can have its place in the toolbox, but if AI becomes the beginning and end of a writer's work, we've lost.