How AI Undermines Thought
The most important book in the world right now is Writing to Learn, by William Zinsser. It is followed closely, in no particular order, by Amusing Ourselves to Death, by Neil Postman; The Shallows, by Nicholas Carr; and the essay “Politics and the English Language,” by George Orwell.
No thinking person should touch an artificial text generator / large language model without reading, understanding, and appreciating the gravity of these texts, and others like them. Each, in their own way, articulates an axiom that hides in plain sight: every thinking person must actively, consciously resist the degradation of rhetoric and the onslaught of technology.
Why my urgency?
Last week I attended the conference of the National Association for College Admission Counseling. AI was everywhere. Sessions were dedicated to it. Speakers discussed how they used it. Exhibitors — by the dozens — promoted products based on it. The message was, whether you’re a college, a high school, a counselor, or a student, if you’re not using AI, you’re missing out.
The fact that it was a college counseling conference is immaterial. I could have been attending almost any other conference or trade show and been similarly unnerved. That’s because the education industry — like so many others — is quickly becoming dominated by artificial intelligence. But, it’s especially concerning when we’re dealing with young minds.
Let’s assume that, on a case by case basis, the use of AI — particularly large language models — can be helpful, ethical, and accurate. A student could use it to proofread an essay. A college could use it to manage enrollment data or evaluate applications. A teacher could use it to do research or assist a student. A businessperson could use it to generate marketing materials.
That’s all fine.
My comfort with these tasks assumes a crucial precondition: that the users already have a working knowledge of language and already have their own capacities for creativity, collaboration, reasoning, and original thought. I think that’s a reasonable assumption. Even high school students have spent plenty of time in a world without AI.
Their successors may not.
Before long — meaning 2–3 years from now — children may be able to grow up in a fully immersive AI world. They will be able to converse with AI chatbots. They will read AI-generated text. They will play games created by AI. They will use AI to write. The texts they “write” will be read by AI. Eventually, their resumes will be written by AI; their prospective employers will read their resumes by AI; and they’ll be hired to perform tasks with AI.
The hallmark of humanity is language. In pre-modern times, language was spoken. In modern times, writing is the basis for cognition, sophisticated thought, and development of the self, and, ultimately, the capacity to appreciate beauty and feel joy. That’s what Zinsser argues — indisputably, if you ask me — in Writing to Learn. Learning requires writing; writing entails learning. That’s how the brain works. (Reading and talking are great too.)
AI evangelists might tell you that when civilization gave up blacksmithing, bowhunting, and ploughing, everyone did not instantly become frail. We have places called gyms and activities called sports, right? We have not lost the ability to exercise. But AI is different.
Using AI to write is like putting your Roomba on a treadmill and calling it exercise. Giving in to AI means losing the ability not just to read, write, and edit but also to think, feel, and imagine. The problem there is that these losses are compounding: the more we lose them, the more prone we are to losing them further.
Yes, AI is a “tool” — it’s an inert, presumably value-neutral thing that helps humans do other things. But, this is the first tool with the potential to undermine actual humanity. Using AI will cause people’s intellect — especially young people’s — to atrophy, or fail to develop in the first place, at heretofore unimaginable scales.
A lot of the AI-generated content that’s now being pushed out on the internet will be absorbed into the AI ecosystem. With each successive recursion, comes out as increasingly entrenched slop — with diminishing human powers to rein it in. In this process, no one is creating. No one is learning. For the best adults who use AI most effective, AI leads to efficiency and productivity. For mediocre adults, it leads to laziness. For kids, it leads to consequences far more dire: the loss of thought and the loss of self.
Writing, then, is not some quaint anachronism, like sewing your own clothes or canning your own fruit, that we should maintain just for kicks. Until the human brain evolves to full cyborg status, writing — along with reading, calculation, and discussion — will remain fundamental to cognition, self-expression, and self-love. We need to teach kids, whether they’re our own offspring or our students, how to learn.
AI can already write books of its own. Are they any good? Maybe, maybe not. Fortunately, AI cannot delete books that already exist.
Every adult needs to use their already developed cognitive skills and read the texts I have cited — or any of the many texts on the same themes. The next conference will be even more heavily dominated by AI. So will the next class, the next job, and the next business relationship.
That includes reading crucial texts — by Zinsser and plenty others — that affirm our humanity. If we don’t, the robots are not going to it for us.
Image courtesy of Freepik.
Related Blogs by Josh
Getting Past ‘Personal Growth’ in College Essays
‘Character Development’ and the College Applicant
College Essays and the Misuse of ‘Voice’
Josh Stephens is a longtime educator based in Los Angeles. He has advised domestic and international students on college applications for over a decade. He blogs about college admissions and essay-writing on Medium and the Huffington Post. He earned his bachelor’s degree in English at Princeton University and his Master of Public Policy at the Harvard University Kennedy School of Government. He is the author of books on urban planning, The Urban Mystique and Planners Across America.
He can be reached at josh@joshrstephens.net.
