I assume most of my college writing students are already using AI—whether as a brainstorming partner, a sentence-polisher, or, in some cases, a full-blown ghostwriter. I don’t waste time pretending otherwise. But I also make one thing very clear: I will never accuse anyone of plagiarism. What I will do is grade the work on its quality—and if the writing has that all-too-familiar AI aroma—smooth, generic, cliché-ridden, and devoid of voice—I’m giving it a low grade.
Not because it was written with AI.
Because it’s bad writing.
What I encourage, instead, is intentional AI use—students learning how to talk to ChatGPT with precision and personality, shaping it to match their own style, rather than outsourcing their voice entirely. AI is a tool, just like Word, Windows, or PowerPoint. It’s a new common currency in the information age, and we’d be foolish not to teach students how to spend it wisely.
A short video that supports this view—“Lovely Take on Students Cheating with ChatGPT” by TheCodeWork—compares the rise of AI in writing to the arrival of calculators in 1970s math classrooms. Calculators didn’t destroy mathematical thinking—they freed students from rote drudgery and pushed them into more conceptual terrain. Likewise, AI can make writing better—but only if students know what good writing looks like.
The challenge for instructors now is to change the assignments, as the video suggests. Students should be analyzing AI-generated drafts, critiquing them, improving them, and understanding why some outputs succeed while others fall flat. The writing process is no longer confined to a blank Word doc—it now includes the strategic prompting of large language models and the thoughtful revision of what they produce.
But the devil, as always, is in the details.
How will students know what a “desired result” is unless they’ve read widely, written deeply, and built a literary compass? Prompting ChatGPT is only as useful as the student’s ability to recognize quality when they see it. That’s where we come in—as instructors, our job is to show them side-by-side examples of AI-generated writing and guide them through what makes one version stronger, sharper, more human.
Looking forward, I suspect composition courses will move toward multimodal assignments—writing paired with video, audio, visual art, or even music. AI won’t just change the process—it will expand the format. The essay will survive, yes, but it may arrive with a podcast trailer or a hand-drawn infographic in tow.
There’s no going back. AI has changed the game, and pretending otherwise is educational malpractice. But we’re not here to fight the future. We’re here to teach students how to shape it with a voice that’s unmistakably their own.
Cinemorphosis 
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