It was the middle of September when my Medicare card arrived in the mail. I held it for a moment and studied my name printed beneath the red, white, and blue bands. It felt like a rite of passage, another bureaucratic marker on the road to retirement. No ceremony. No gold watch. Just a government-issued card informing me that I had entered a new demographic.
That same day, I held a Zoom office hour. One student showed up. I told her I was retiring, and somehow our conversation wandered from Mr. T as an icon of the 1980s to whether AI could replicate the music of SZA to Zach Cregger’s Weapons, which she was writing about for her essay. We talked about how the movie could be frightening and funny at the same time. Before leaving, she told me she felt fortunate to have taken my critical thinking class before I retired. I thanked her. After forty years of teaching, you learn not to brush aside a compliment from a student. You put it in your pocket.
After the Zoom meeting, I started thinking about the tools that had changed my teaching. Google Docs was one of the great breakthroughs. A student’s paper no longer had to exist as a stack of stapled pages handed across a desk. The document floated somewhere in the cloud, a kind of fairy manuscript that student and teacher could enter simultaneously, revising sentences together from different locations.
Then my wife introduced me to Google Slides. Once I realized how visually my students processed information, I practically lived on Slides. An assignment that seemed hopelessly dense on a two-page handout could become intelligible when broken into a sequence of clean visual ideas. I can scarcely imagine the final seven years of my teaching career without it.
Then came generative AI.
At first, AI seemed like another extraordinary professional tool. It accelerated research. It intensified brainstorming. It helped me develop assignment prompts, test arguments, generate counterarguments, and discover connections I might have overlooked.
But AI was different from Docs and Slides because it didn’t merely change how I presented my writing. It could change the writing itself.
For my first three years using generative AI, I became intoxicated by its powers of augmentation. Give it an ordinary paragraph and it could return something brighter, sharper, funnier, and more muscular. It added metaphors, jokes, comparisons, rhythms, and linguistic tricks I hadn’t conceived myself. The results were seductive precisely because they sounded better.
There was only one problem. Increasingly, they didn’t sound like me.
I think of those old photo cutout boards at cowboy-themed restaurants and tourist traps. You stand behind a painted cowboy and stick your head through a hole. The photograph contains your face, but everything below your neck belongs to somebody else: narrow waist, six-shooter, boots, chaps, heroic posture. Technically, you’re in the picture. But that isn’t your body.
AI can do the same thing to prose. Your ideas and anecdotes remain visible through the hole, but the rhetorical body surrounding them belongs to the machine.
My second metaphor is less flattering. AI became my literary performance-enhancing drug.
Without AI, I was the natural bodybuilder. Maybe I looked pretty good. Nothing spectacular, but the muscles were mine. Then I discovered rhetorical steroids. Suddenly I could walk onto the stage swollen with metaphors, acid wit, vivid descriptions, elaborate comparisons, and perfectly engineered sentences. Every paragraph flexed.
Worse, I learned how to order the injections.
“Rewrite the following with lucid prose, acid wit, and vivid descriptions.”
That became one of my favorite prompts. I would feed AI a perfectly serviceable piece of writing and watch it return wearing a posing thong and covered in bronzer. My paragraph hadn’t been edited. It had been juiced.
I loved it.
Then a regular reader of my blog finally had enough.
After reading one particularly steroidal post, he left an angry comment filled with expletives. His opening line was memorable:
“Hey, Boomer, cut the shit.”
He told me to tone it down. He was tired of the verbal pyrotechnics. Tired of the relentless jokes and metaphors. Tired, though he didn’t use my metaphor, of watching the Technicolor 4K bodybuilder flex under the stage lights.
I apologized and told him I would tone it down. He later apologized for snapping at me. He’d had a bad morning, he explained, and admitted that he actually enjoyed reading my blog.
“No worries,” I wrote back. “Thanks for the honest feedback.”
And I meant it.
His irritation had exposed something I had been reluctant to admit. I had become so accustomed to AI-enhanced prose that ordinary writing began to look inadequate to me. I had trained my eyes on rhetorical 4K until my natural prose looked like a 250-nit IPS screen. I kept turning up the resolution, contrast, saturation, and brightness until eventually somebody in the audience yelled for me to turn the damn thing down.
So I changed my AI prompt.
“Edit the following for syntax, grammar, and clarity, but keep 95 percent of my original language.”
I call it the 95 Percent Rule. AI remains a powerful professional tool, but the rule establishes a boundary: the machine can clean the window; it doesn’t get to replace the view.
I eventually shared the rule with my students under “Academic Integrity and Best Practices.” It seemed fitting. After years of warning students about outsourcing their thinking to generative AI, I had discovered that I needed guardrails of my own.
That realization arrived at an appropriate moment. My Medicare card was sitting on my desk. Retirement was approaching. Forty years of teaching had taken me from paper essays to documents floating in the cloud, from classroom handouts to Google Slides, and finally to machines capable of rewriting a person’s sentences in seconds.
The tools had changed my teaching. Some had even changed the way my brain worked.
Now, as I prepared to leave the classroom, I had one more thing to retire.
The cowboy body could go back behind the plywood.
The PED-bloated bodybuilder could leave the stage.
I wanted my own sentences back.
