AI, Writing Pedagogy, and the Offshoring of Education

In a recent article, Kennesaw State University’s Jeanne Law argues that generative artificial intelligence shouldn’t be viewed as a cheating machine, but as a technological liberator that frees us from all of the painful “busywork” of writing—all the planning and researching and drafting and revising that composing requires. According to Law, by “automating routine cognitive tasks” such as these, students will be free to work on what she calls the “deeper processes” of writing. We should therefore see AI as “a useful tool that enhances, rather than hampers, the writing process.”

I couldn’t disagree more.

I think our disagreement is rooted in the fact that Law and I have fundamentally different ideas about the nature of the writing process and the purpose of writing, particularly in an academic context. In this post I’d like to explore why I think these differences matter and why you might choose to embrace the full experience of the writing process.

Law is clearly eager to establish that students use AI for “education-related” rather than education-defeating purposes. In a section titled “Helping With the Busywork,” she (rather uncritically) cites a report from the world’s foremost AI tech company to help make that case. The report’s opening line reads: “More than any other use case, more than any other kind of user, college-aged young adults in the US are embracing ChatGPT, and they’re doing so to learn.” The report also offers a brief gloss on a survey OpenAI conducted to examine how students use the company’s flagship product, ChatGPT. Students overwhelming use ChatGPT to produce writing. In fact, “the top five uses for students were writing-centered: starting papers and projects (49%); summarizing long texts (48%); brainstorming creative projects (45%); exploring new topics (44%); and revising writing (44%). To Law, the fact that students are using AI in these ways serves to “challenge the assumption that students use AI merely to cheat or write entire papers.” There are some obvious problems with the inferences Law draws from these statistics, but I’d like to focus on the idea that AI offers an “enhancement” of the writing process.

Although Law clearly thinks the wholesale adoption of a computer-generated essay is wrong, she also believes that the students are not cheating when they use an online bot to do things like: generate ideas, summarize long (presumably boring) texts, be “creative,” engage in inquiry, and revise their writing.¹ Law thinks that AI is useful because it can free us from the drudgery of the writing process: the “trivial tasks,” the “busywork” of writing. To her mind, AI allows “students to automate routine cognitive tasks” so as to “free up more time to engage in deeper processes and metacognitive behaviors”: the really important work of “honing” and “organizing” and “refining” ideas and language. There is this odd sense in Law’s reasoning that students already know how to write perfectly well; but now, with AI, they are just freeing themselves from the vulgar and menial tasks that are beneath them—things too repetitive or time-consuming or basic for them to complete for themselves. But as someone who has taught first-year writing for 20 years, I can tell you that students can’t write perfectly well. And the golden age of “metacognition” Law looks forward to is rather empty, is it not? This isn’t the student thinking about her own thinking; the thinking is being performed on the writing the student didn’t produce, sources they didn’t find, questions they didn’t ponder, language they didn’t craft. There’s no meta in this cognition.

Law’s language here is revealing—all the honing and refining and automating and leveraging makes writing sound like some kind of industrial process in an advanced economy, one where offshoring the dirty work of mining raw materials allows us to realize dramatic reductions in labor costs. We outsource all the filthy, mindless, manual work to some faraway place we never have to acknowledge or confront, then all of that invisible labor magically materializes in the form of imported raw materials ready for final assembly in our domestic factory. Then: profit! However, these are not appropriate metaphors or analogies for understanding the process of writing and learning; the metaphorical framing Law uses contributes to fundamental misunderstandings about the nature and purpose of the writing process.

I think one explanation for why Law thinks the way she does is that she imagines that the point of writing is merely the production of beautiful content for some audience who requests it, such as a professor or employer. And she is not alone. There are many who agree with her. There are entire systems of education that have embraced this, I think very mistaken, idea. However, it only makes sense to cut corners in the writing process with an AI tool in this way if we imagine education as a kind of economy rooted in the exchange of educational products that receive compensation in the form of grades. But that is an utterly impoverished understanding of the purpose of education and the experience of the writing process.

So what is the writing process? What happens during the writing process? What is it for?

Let me tell you something important that I have learned after 20 years of teaching college writing at some pretty decent schools: student essays suck. Like, hard. Even the really good ones suck. And that’s fine; they are supposed to suck. The point is not that students publish something in the New Yorker at the end of the term, but that they learned to inquire. The finished product didn’t really matter so much; what matters is that they looked into things, they researched, they asked questions. And not by outsourcing it. They read deeply, intently, critically—with their own unique brains. They learned how to find things in the library that would help them with their questions and they took time to understand the importance of arcane processes like peer review. They identified experts and authorities on the topic of concern and considered the critical conversation transpiring between them. They learned how to critically evaluate source materials. They annotated things that seemed important and took notes to use later. They viewed this whole experience as an attempt to articulate something that was meaningful to them.

During this process they encountered ideas they’d never thought of before: some that challenged their own thinking; some that changed their minds completely; some that fairly blew their minds. More than once the arguments and evidence they encountered so radically altered the trajectory of their thinking that they had to completely start over: they began with one idea, but ended up somewhere completely different, someplace totally unexpected. And they wanted to get it right, so they followed their thinking wherever it went, writing and editing along the way. ²

Sometimes, and this is the most important thing I want to say, the change of mind occurred not because they read someone else’s idea, but because they stumbled onto a new idea in the process of trying to articulate their old one. The writing process generated some idea they couldn’t have imagined beforehand, like some form of magic, or an odd sort of amanuensis. As a result, the student had to burn an acre of hard-earned paragraphs they had delicately cultivated over days or weeks.³ And although that experience was painful and difficult and even scary, the writers later reflected that their project would have never become what it was without it.

As they drafted, these writers imagined an audience—actual people whose views and values and experiences matter. People we share our world with. And they considered how best to approach these individuals in order to make a good case, because these student writers understood writing and communication as profoundly social and human activities. The students also felt a duty to get things right, to honor the subject they wrote about, to speak truthfully, to contribute in some way to the share of knowledge we have about the world. The point wasn’t to primp and smooth and dress up some bullshit that fit the bill for the assignment, the students believed that what they said actually mattered—to them and to others. They cared.

But, above all, these students took this experience as an opportunity to discover something about themselves. In a word, they submitted to a process of becoming: they transcended themselves; they explored their humanity; they took charge of their own evolution; they grew. There is no substitute for that. You can’t offshore your thinking, your humanity. You just have to do the work. You have to want to do the work. And if you don’t want to do that, then see footnote #3.