Why I Need to Craft “Natty” Wring Prompts

About fifteen years ago, one of my students wrote a personal narrative about losing herself. She was in middle school. Her friends persuaded her to dress in extremely suggestive clothing with tons of makeup. In a revealing outfit that would have caused her mother to have a brain hemorrhage, she looked in the mirror and started crying. “I didn’t even recognize the girl staring back at me,” she wrote. “I wiped the makeup off, got back in my regular clothes, ran home, and cried in bed.” 

I thought about that image as I started working on some writing prompts for the Fall Semester in which my eighteen-year-old college freshmen contrast writing with AI and writing “natty,” to use an expression that describes “natural” bodybuilders who don’t take performance-enhancing drugs. Generative AI can be a great writing tool, but it tends to overdo everything. Our writing becomes that crying overdone girl staring back at herself, or the bloated bodybuilder who is more cartoon than a celebration of the physique. In all of that generative AI, something gets lost. 

Us. 

We can hardly be blamed. Generative AI can feel like magic, taking a 300-word idea and blowing it up into a 2,000-word essay with vivid descriptions, highly stylized metaphors and witticisms, and Socratic rhetorical flourish. Eventually, we begin to believe we are the source of that 2,000-word essay. We flatter ourselves to our own detriment. We lose authenticity. We lose ourselves. We are that middle school girl staring into the mirror and not recognizing who’s looking back at us. 

Using AI tools with my students for the last four years, I can say from personal experience that writing natty feels cleansing, like going off sugar-laden processed foods. Just as too much dessert causes diabetes of the body, too much generative AI causes diabetes of the mind and soul. We need to carve out natural writing spaces where we can connect with who we truly are before it’s too late.