I know too many professionals and academics—including myself—who use generative AI as a writing and thinking tool for me to tell students that AI is somehow forbidden in my class. Apart from being virtually impossible to enforce, such a prohibition would be the apotheosis of hypocrisy.
Instead, I want to distinguish between effective and ineffective uses of generative AI and explain how I grade assignments that amount to AI slop: an effluvium of smooth, competent-sounding prose that says remarkably little, relies on hackneyed AI expressions, and substitutes verbal polish for actual analysis.
I think of generative AI as a performance-enhancing drug and the AI user as a bodybuilder. A natural bodybuilder has difficulty competing against athletes using PEDs because the drugs provide enormous advantages in size, strength, muscularity, and recovery. Generative AI creates a similar imbalance. A student or professional who completely goes off the AI grid may struggle to match the speed, volume, and polish of someone who knows how to use these tools effectively.
But here’s the rub: the bodybuilder still has to get in his reps. He has to drag himself into the gym, lift the weights, eat properly, consume enough protein, and hit his macros. The drugs cannot perform the workout for him.
Imagine instead someone sprawled on the couch all day watching Netflix, surviving on Hot Pockets, Doritos, and chocolate pudding, while taking PEDs. He will not magically wake up looking like Mr. Olympia. He will remain a tomato with four toothpicks sticking out of it.
Writers are no different. They have to get in their reps and hit their intellectual macros. That means doing the heavy lifting: reading carefully, thinking deeply, developing arguments, gathering evidence, writing drafts, confronting counterarguments, and rewriting weak passages. Once that work has been done, generative AI can become an extraordinarily useful tool for questioning ideas, identifying weaknesses, improving clarity, reorganizing material, editing prose, and assisting with revision.
The problem begins when the student skips the intellectual workout and treats AI like a genie in a bottle: type in a prompt, rub the lamp, and watch a finished essay materialize.
When I encounter an assignment like this, I am not interested in playing detective and arguing with a student about whether a particular sentence was generated by AI. I can simply grade the work in front of me. If the essay consists of generic observations, canned transitions, predictable arguments, inflated language, and smooth paragraphs without substantive analysis, then it fails to demonstrate the Student Learning Outcomes. It may be grammatically pristine and rhetorically lifeless at the same time.
So my policy is simple: use generative AI, but do not outsource your education to it.
Do the reading. Do the thinking. Develop the argument. Wrestle with the evidence. Write and rewrite. Then use AI where it can genuinely help you—as an editor, critic, brainstorming partner, and revision tool.
AI can enhance the work. It cannot replace the work.
Cinemorphosis 
Leave a comment