“AI” Articles

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?

Utilitarian reading (AI) considers words as symbols referring only to other symbols like them. Words are therefore interchangeable, fungible—place holders for each other. AI obligingly sorts the symbols so as to condense and summarize them. By contrast, close reading offers not an answer but a presence. Words are not fungible tokens but embodiments of a speaker’s voice. In utilitarian reading we SEE the words. In close reading we HEAR them, and behind those spoken words someone speaking them.