My thoughts on AI are I don’t blame guns for gun violence, I don’t blame hammers when a contractor screws up, and I don’t blame AI tools when the student is too dumb to utilize it properly. I’ve been using ChatGPT to great effect, but I’m well aware of what is is equipped to handle and what it is not.

Else I’d be the type of person to grab a hammer and then rage at the void about how bad hammers are at cooking Thanksgiving dinner.

Counterpoint: the main product of a student writing a piece is not the piece they wrote, but the act of writing it. If you evaluate the outcome of the situation solely by the piece of paper and the words that are written on it, then the world is a much better place for students using LLMs. But if you evaluate the outcome by the student’s understanding of the subject, then I think we’re better off with the students having to mentally explore the nooks and cranies, footguns and subtleties of the subject. We’re better off with them pursuing a wrong line of thought, realizing it, and having to go back and try again.

Having a student write a piece – and by this I really mean write a piece, not delegate it or parts of it to a third party – is incredibly beneficial. Annoyingly, our means for checking that a student wrote a piece has always been to look at the words they wrote on a piece of paper, but the words and the paper were never really the point.

Let me ask you something. It is completely possible for a machine to do simple welds, right? Would you say that there is no reason for a welder to practice simple welds since a machine can do it?

To me, the same is true of writing. Nobody cares about the essay that was written, but it is practicing for writing that people do care about You can’t learn skills like this without doing them.