I first used this title, “Can It Be True?,” for my previous post, written in a partly panicky, partly skeptical response to a recent New Yorker article asking whether, because of AI, reading may be dead.

Now I’m reusing the same title. Why? and why so soon? Because I just came across a subsequent article in The New Yorker, asking whether, because of AI, writing may be dead as well.

Well, not all writing. The exact title is: “What Happens After AI Destroys College Writing?,” by English professor Hua Hsu. So not writing everywhere. But having writing die in college is bad enough, because that’s where most of us in my generation (I graduated in 1964) learned to do it— learned to do it, that is, in a more than a rote, mechanical way.

But learning to write in a “rote mechanical way” was the very skill that had gotten us into college in the first place. Back in those days, we college freshmen all knew how to write the so-called “perfect theme,” perfectly. I mean the five-paragraph essay, with its intro paragraph, three paragraphs of illustration, and conclusion. We were champs at it. But now our college teachers were telling us emphatically, on our first day of class, to throw that horrible, boring, pompous “perfect theme” in the trash and start all over again. The “perfect theme” wasn’t perfect after all! In fact, it was useless, an impediment, and a sure target for our teachers’ sarcastic comments. Talk about a rude awakening.

So… What were we to write instead?, we cried out, in shock, anger, and helpless disbelief. Tell us what to do! we cried out in supplication. And there was our problem. We were crying out for the wrong thing. The answer we were looking for wasn’t a “what.” It was a “how.” And “how” wouldn’t come from our teachers, but only from ourselves.

Or to the put the problem in slightly different terms, we were being asked, not what we knew, but how we knew it. (The difference between “what” and “how” has been my constant study ever since.)

I thought of that moment of surprised chagrin back in Freshman English decades ago as I read Hua Hsu’s account of his own and other English teachers’ present dismay at the way AI seems to be making the teaching of writing obsolete, maybe even pointless. Students don’t have to struggle to write their papers any longer. AI will do it for them, and do it well.

So in a way, the tables have been turned. It’s no longer the student who’s shocked by the unwelcome demands made on him or her by the first writing assignment. It’s the teacher who’s shocked, this time by the question of what’s to be done with the result, since it wasn’t the student who wrote the paper, but a computer.

But if today’s English teachers are shocked at getting “perfect themes” because AI is writing them, why are they giving assignments for which “perfect themes” are the correct responses? Why, in other words, are they asking their students “What?” and not “How”?

In my opinion, it’s not because Hua Hsu and his colleagues don’t know the difference been asking “What?” and “How?” Or because they actually prefer to ask “What?” rather than “How?’ It’s because, in the age of AI, they feel helplessly dismayed when they confront the world their students are coming of age in:

Students these days view college as consumers, in ways that never would have occurred to me when I was their age. They’ve grown up at a time when society values high-speed takes, not the slow deliberation of critical thinking. Although I’ve empathized with my students’ various mini-dramas, I rarely project myself into their lives. I notice them noticing one another, and I let the mysteries of their lives go. Their pressures are so different from the ones I felt as a student. Although I envy their metabolisms, I would not wish for their sense of horizons.

Hua Hsu doesn’t elaborate on what he thinks his students’ “sense of horizons” is, but I think he imagines that it encompasses a distance that’s very short, and getting shorter. Maybe their sense reaches just to the next day, maybe even only to the next moment. Certainly any writing assignment that threatens to stretch students beyond the capacity of their AI-induced near-sightedness must seem blurry to them, maybe threateningly foggy. How, then, would you design assignments asking “How?” of students into whose lives you feel you can’t “project” yourself, because you’re speaking to them from too great a distance? “What?” gets an immediate response. “How?” can take a lifetime to answer.

And could today’s students be motivated to want to play such a long game? Back in the Sixties, or even much later, thirty years ago, when Hsu began his teaching career (and before the full blossoming of the internet, one notes), teachers could rely on the belief that writing was directed towards meaning. That while words could never capture the whole truth of a matter, they brought one closer to it, and that the struggle to approach that goal beyond the words themselves had its own value. Fortified by that belief, I and students like me soldiered on, even under the withering fire of our teachers’ sarcastic marginal comments pointing out where we had fallen back on a cliché here, or failed to define our terms there. We were all engaged in a common pursuit, and our teachers weren’t necessarily closer to the holy grail than we were.

But for students today, according to Hsu, the holy grail of meaning seems lost in the fog, barely discernible. He speaks plaintively about what remains for him and his students to do in guiding themselves by the little that’s left of it:

Education, particularly in the humanities, rests on a belief that, alongside the practical things students might retain, some arcane idea mentioned in passing might take root in their mind, blossoming years in the future. AI allows any of us to feel like an expert, but it is risk, doubt, and failure that make us human. I often tell my students that this is the last time in their lives that someone will have to read something they write, so they might as well tell me what they actually think.

Really? The “last time in their lives…”? But what happens to students after they reach that dire, apocalyptic-sounding “last time”? What kind of cataclysm awaits them? Why shouldn’t students sigh in relief instead? For if “risk, doubt, and failure” really do make us “human,” and if AI threatens to cancel out those ugly possibilities by canceling out writing, why should students complain? “Risk, doubt, and failure” certainly sound like a grim trio to use as pedagogical incentives. I experienced them constantly as a student, and still do (even as I write this essay!), but I was never told they were a reward in themselves. No, Hsu and I were both made to feel that writing could bring us closer to clarity about ourselves and the world. Not the only way. Music and math could bring us closer also. But there was an “out there” to get closer to, and it was beautiful, and it made the pain of approaching it worthwhile.

After getting his PhD in English literature, George Dardess taught close reading to his own students until his retirement. Since then he has been ordained a Deacon in the Roman Catholic Church and written several books on Muslim-Christian relations. He has also created the graphic novel Foreign Exchange.

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