Cinemorphosis

Category: Education in the AI Age

  • The Future of Writing in the Age of A.I.: A College Essay Prompt

    The Future of Writing in the Age of A.I.: A College Essay Prompt

    INTRODUCTION & CONTEXT
     In the not-so-distant past, writing was a slow, solitary act—a process that demanded time, introspection, and labor. But with the rise of generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Sudowrite, and GrammarlyGO, composition now has a button. Language can be mass-produced at scale, tuned to sound pleasant, neutral, polite—and eerily interchangeable. What once felt personal and arduous is now instantaneous and oddly soulless.

    In “The Great Language Flattening,” Victoria Turk argues that A.I. is training us to speak and write in “saccharine, sterile, synthetic” prose. She warns that our desire to optimize communication has come at the expense of voice, friction, and even individuality. Similarly, Cal Newport’s “What Kind of Writer is ChatGPT?” insists that while A.I. tools may mimic surface-level structure, they lack the “struggle” that gives rise to genuine insight. Their words float, untethered by thought, context, or consequences.

    But are these critiques overblown? In “ChatGPT Doesn’t Have to Ruin College,” Tyler Austin Harper suggests that the real danger isn’t A.I.—it’s a pedagogical failure. Writing assignments that can be done by A.I. were never meaningful to begin with. Harper argues that educators should double down on originality, reflection, and assignments that resist automation. Meanwhile, in “Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?,” the author explores the institutional panic: as machine-generated writing becomes the norm, will critical thinking and close reading—the bedrock of the humanities—be considered obsolete?

    Adding complexity to this discussion, Lila Shroff’s “The Gen Z Lifestyle Subsidy” examines how young people increasingly outsource tasks once seen as rites of passage—cooking, cleaning, dating, even thinking. Is using A.I. to write your essay any different from using DoorDash to eat, Bumble to flirt, or TikTok to learn? And in “Why Even Try If You Have A.I.?,” Joshua Rothman diagnoses a deeper ennui: if machines can do everything better, faster, and cheaper—why struggle at all? What, if anything, is the value of effort in an automated world?

    This prompt asks you to grapple with a provocative and unavoidable question: What is the future of human writing in an age when machines can write for us?

    ASSIGNMENT INSTRUCTIONS

    Write a 1,700 word argumentative essay that answers the following question:

    Should the rise of generative A.I. mark the end of traditional writing instruction—or should it inspire us to reinvent writing as a deeply human, irreplaceable act?

    You must take a clear position on this question and argue it persuasively using at least four of the assigned readings. You are also encouraged to draw on personal experience, classroom observations, or examples from digital culture, but your essay must engage with the ideas and arguments presented in the texts.

    STRUCTURE AND EXPECTATIONS

    Your essay should include the following sections:

    I. INTRODUCTION (Approx. 300 words)

    • Hook your reader with a compelling anecdote, statistic, or image from your own experience with A.I. (e.g., using ChatGPT to brainstorm, cheating, rewriting, etc.).
    • Briefly introduce the conversation surrounding A.I. and the act of writing. Frame the debate: Is writing becoming obsolete? Or is it being reborn?
    • End with a sharply focused thesis that takes a clear, defensible position on the prompt.

    Sample thesis:

    While A.I. can generate fluent prose, it cannot replicate the messiness, insight, and moral weight of human writing—therefore, the role of writing instruction should not be reduced, but radically reinvented to prioritize voice, thought, and originality.

    II. BACKGROUND AND DEFINITIONAL FRAMING (Approx. 250

    • Define key terms like “generative A.I.,” “writing instruction,” and “voice.” Be precise.
    • Briefly explain how generative A.I. systems (like ChatGPT) work and how they are currently being used in educational and workplace settings.
    • Set up the stakes: Why does this conversation matter? What do we lose (or gain) if writing becomes largely machine-generated?

    III. ARGUMENT #1 – A.I. Is Flattening Language (Approx. 300 words)

    • Engage deeply with “The Great Language Flattening” by Victoria Turk.
    • Analyze how A.I.-generated language may lead to a homogenization of voice, tone, and personality.
    • Provide examples—either from your own experiments with A.I. or from the essay—that illustrate this flattening.
    • Connect to Newport’s argument: If writing becomes too “safe,” does it also become meaningless?

    IV. ARGUMENT #2 – The Need for Reinvention, Not Abandonment (Approx. 300 words)

    • Use Harper’s “ChatGPT Doesn’t Have to Ruin College” and the humanities-focused essay to argue that A.I. doesn’t spell the death of writing—it exposes the weakness of uninspired assignments.
    • Defend the idea that writing pedagogy should evolve by embracing personal narratives, critical analysis, and rhetorical complexity—tasks that A.I. can’t perform well (yet).
    • Address the counterpoint that some students prefer to use A.I. out of necessity, not laziness (e.g., time constraints, language barriers).

    V. ARGUMENT #3 – A Culture of Outsourcing (Approx. 300 words)

    • Bring in Lila Shroff’s “The Gen Z Lifestyle Subsidy” to examine the cultural shift toward convenience, automation, and outsourcing.
    • Ask the difficult question: If we already outsource our food, our shopping, our dates, and even our emotions (via TikTok), isn’t outsourcing our writing the logical next step?
    • Argue whether this mindset is sustainable—or whether it erodes something essential to human development and self-expression.

    VI. ARGUMENT #4 – Why Write at All? (Approx. 300  words)

    • Engage with Joshua Rothman’s existential meditation on motivation in “Why Even Try If You Have A.I.?”
    • Discuss the psychological toll of competing with A.I.—and whether effort still has value in an age of frictionless automation.
    • Make the case for writing as not just a skill, but a process of becoming: intellectual, emotional, and ethical maturation.

    VII. COUNTERARGUMENT AND REBUTTAL (Approx. 250  words)

    • Consider the argument that A.I. tools democratize writing by making it easier for non-native speakers, neurodiverse students, and time-strapped workers.
    • Acknowledge the appeal and utility of A.I. assistance.
    • Then rebut: Can ease and access coexist with depth and authenticity? Where is the line between tool and crutch? What happens when we no longer need to wrestle with words?

    VIII. CONCLUSION (Approx. 200 words)

    • Revisit your thesis in a way that reflects the journey of your argument.
    • Reflect on your own evolving relationship with writing and A.I.
    • Offer a call to action for educators, institutions, or individuals: What kind of writers—and thinkers—do we want to become in the A.I. age?

    REQUIREMENTS CHECKLIST

    • Word Count: 1,700 words
    • Minimum of four cited sources from the six assigned
    • Direct quotes and/or paraphrases with MLA-style in-text citations
    • Works Cited page using MLA format
    • Clear argumentative thesis
    • At least one counterargument with a rebuttal
    • Original title that reflects your position

    ESSAY EVALUATION RUBRIC (Simplified)

    CRITERIADESCRIPTION
    Thesis & ArgumentStrong, debatable thesis; clear stance maintained throughout
    Use of SourcesEffective integration of at least four assigned texts; accurate and meaningful engagement with the ideas presented
    Organization & FlowLogical structure; strong transitions; each paragraph develops a single, coherent idea
    Voice & StyleClear, vivid prose with a balance of analytical and personal voice
    Depth of ThoughtInsightful analysis; complex thinking; engagement with nuance and counterpoints
    Mechanics & MLA FormattingCorrect grammar, punctuation, and MLA citations; properly formatted Works Cited page
    Word CountMeets or exceeds minimum word requirement

    MLA Citations (Works Cited Format):

    Turk, Victoria. “The Great Language Flattening.” Wired, Condé Nast, 21 Apr. 2023, www.wired.com/story/the-great-language-flattening/.

    Harper, Tyler Austin. “ChatGPT Doesn’t Have to Ruin College.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 27 Jan. 2023, www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/01/chatgpt-college-students-ai-writing/672879/.

    Shroff, Lila. “The Gen Z Lifestyle Subsidy.” The Cut, New York Media, 25 Oct. 2023, www.thecut.com/article/gen-z-lifestyle-subsidy-tiktok.html.

    Burnett, D. Graham. “Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?” The New York Review of Books, 8 Feb. 2024, www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/02/08/will-the-humanities-survive-artificial-intelligence-burnett/.

    Newport, Cal. “What Kind of Writer Is ChatGPT?” The New Yorker, Condé Nast, 16 Jan. 2023, www.newyorker.com/news/essay/what-kind-of-writer-is-chatgpt.

    Rothman, Joshua. “Why Even Try If You Have A.I.?” The New Yorker, Condé Nast, 10 July 2023, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/07/10/why-even-try-if-you-have-ai.

    OPTIONAL DISCUSSION STARTERS FOR CLASSROOM USE

    To help students brainstorm and debate, consider using the following prompts in small groups or class discussions:

    1. Is it “cheating” to use A.I. if the result is better than what you could write on your own?
    2. Have you ever used A.I. to help write something? Were you satisfied—or unsettled?
    3. If everyone uses A.I. to write, will “good writing” become meaningless?
    4. Should English professors teach students how to use A.I. ethically, or ban it outright?
    5. What makes writing feel human?
  • Rewind, Delete, Regret: The Cost of Editing Love

    Rewind, Delete, Regret: The Cost of Editing Love

    Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Black Mirror’s The Entire History of You are thematically bound by a shared anxiety: the dangerous seduction of technological control over memory. In Eternal Sunshine, memory erasure is marketed as emotional liberation—a clean slate for the brokenhearted. Similarly, in “The Entire History of You,” the brain-implanted “grain” promises perfect recall, total clarity, and the ability to replay moments with photographic precision. Both stories probe a fundamental question: if we could edit our pasts—delete pain, scrutinize joy, control the narrative—would we be better off, or would we unravel?

    Both works reveal that tampering with memory doesn’t resolve emotional suffering; it distorts and magnifies it. In Eternal Sunshine, Joel and Clementine attempt to erase each other, only to circle back into the same patterns of love, longing, and dysfunction. Their emotional chemistry survives the purge, suggesting that memory is not simply data but something embedded in identity, instinct, and the soul. “The Entire History of You” flips the dynamic: instead of forgetting, the characters remember too much. Liam’s obsessive rewinding of moments with his wife becomes a self-inflicted wound, each replay deepening his paranoia and unraveling his sense of reality. The technology doesn’t heal him—it traps him in a recursive loop of doubt and resentment.

    The irony in both narratives is that the human mind, with all its flaws—forgetfulness, bias, emotional haze—is actually what allows us to forgive, to grow, to love again. Eternal Sunshine presents memory loss as a form of mercy, but ultimately asserts that pain and connection are inseparable. The Entire History of You warns that perfect memory is no better; it turns love into surveillance, and intimacy into evidence. In both cases, technology doesn’t enhance humanity—it reveals its brittleness. It offers a fantasy of control over the uncontrollable: the messiness of relationships, the ambiguity of feelings, the inevitability of loss.

    Thus, Eternal Sunshine serves as a philosophical and emotional precursor to “The Entire History of You.” Where one is melancholic and lyrical, the other is clinical and chilling—but both reach the same conclusion: to be human is to remember imperfectly. Whether we erase the past or obsessively relive it, we risk losing what actually makes relationships meaningful—our capacity to feel, forget, forgive, and fumble our way forward. Memory, in both stories, is less about accuracy than emotional truth—and trying to mechanize that truth leads only to alienation.

  • The Design Space Is Shrinking: How A.I. Trains Us to Stop Trying

    The Design Space Is Shrinking: How A.I. Trains Us to Stop Trying

    New Yorker writer Joshua Rothman asks the question that haunts every creative in the age of algorithmic assistance: Why even try if A.I. can do it for you?
     His essay  “Why Even Try If You Have A.I.?”unpacks a cultural crossroads: we can be passive passengers on an automated flight to mediocrity, or we can grab the yoke, face the headwinds, and fly the damn plane ourselves. The latter takes effort and agency. The former? Just surrender, recline your seat, and trust the software.

    Rothman begins with a deceptively simple truth: human excellence is born through repetition and variation. Take a piano sonata. Play it every day and it evolves—new inflections emerge, tempo shifts, harmonies stretch and bend. The music becomes yours not because it’s perfect, but because it’s lived. This principle holds across any discipline: cooking, lifting, writing, woodworking, improv jazz. The point isn’t to chase perfection, but to expand what engineers call your “design space”—the evolving terrain of mastery passed from one generation to the next. It’s how we adapt, create, and flourish. Variation, not polish, is the currency of human survival.

    A.I. disrupts that process. Not through catastrophe, but convenience. It lifts the burden of repetition, which sounds like mercy, but may be slow annihilation. Why wrestle with phrasing when a chatbot can generate ten variations in a second? Why compose from scratch when you can scroll through synthetic riffs until one sounds “good enough”? At some point, you’re not a creator—you’re a casting agent, auditioning content for a machine-written reality show.

    This is the creep of A.I.—not Terminator-style annihilation, but frictionless delegation.
    Repetition gets replaced by selection. Cognitive strain is erased. The design space—the sacred ground of human flourishing—gets paved over with one-size-fits-all templates. And we love it, because it’s easy.

    Take car shopping. Do I really want to endure a gauntlet of slick-haired salesmen and endless test drives? Or would I rather ask ChatGPT to confirm what I already believe—that the 2025 Honda Accord Hybrid Touring is the best sedan under 40K, and that metallic eggshell is obviously the right color for my soulful-but-sensible lifestyle?
    A.I. doesn’t challenge me. It affirms me, reflects me, flatters me. That’s the trap.

    But here’s where I resist: I’m 63, and I still train like a lunatic in my garage with kettlebells five days a week. No algorithm writes my workouts. I improvise like a jazz drummer on creatine—Workout A (heavy), Workout B (medium), Workout C (light). It’s messy, adaptive, and real. I rely on sweat, not suggestions. Pain is the feedback loop. Soreness is the algorithm.

    Same goes for piano. Every day, I sit and play. Some pieces have taken a decade to shape. A.I. can’t help here—not meaningfully. Because writing music isn’t about what works. It’s about what moves. And that takes time. Revision. Tension. Discomfort.

    That said, I’ve made peace with the fact that A.I. is to writing what steroids are to a bodybuilder. I like to think I’ve got a decent handle on rhetoric—my tone, my voice, my structure, my knack for crafting an argument. But let’s not kid ourselves: I’ve run my prose against ChatGPT, and in more than a few rounds, it’s left me eating dust. Without A.I., I’m a natural bodybuilder—posing clean, proud, and underwhelming. With A.I., I’m a chemically enhanced colossus, veins bulging with metaphor and syntax so tight it could cut glass. In the literary arena, if the choice is between my authentic, mortal self and the algorithmic beast? Hand me the syringe. I’ll flex with the machine.

    Still, I know the difference. And knowing the difference is everything.

  • If You Only Watch One Black Mirror episode, Let It Be “Joan Is Awful”

    If You Only Watch One Black Mirror episode, Let It Be “Joan Is Awful”

    If you only watch one episode of Black Mirror, let it be Joan Is Awful—especially if you have a low tolerance for tech-dystopian fever dreams involving eye-implants, social scores, or digital consciousness uploaded to bees. This one doesn’t take place in a dark tomorrow—it’s about the pathology of right now. It skewers the Curated Era we already live in, where selfhood has been gamified, privacy is casually torched, and we’re all trapped in the compulsion to turn our lives into content—often awful, but clickable content.

    Joan, the title character, is painfully ordinary: a mid-level tech worker trying to swap out one man (her manic ex) for another (her milquetoast fiancé) and coast into a life of retail therapy and artisanal beverages. Her existence—Instagrammable, calibrated, aggressively average—is exactly the kind of raw material the in-universe Netflix clone Streamberry is looking for. They turn her life into a show called “Joan Is Awful,” starring a CGI deepfake Salma Hayek version of Joan, who reenacts her life with heightened melodrama and algorithmically-optimized awfulness.

    This isn’t speculative fiction. It’s just fiction.
    Streamberry’s vision of a personalized show for everyone—one that amplifies your worst traits and pushes them out for mass consumption—is barely an exaggeration of what Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube are already doing. We’ve all become our own showrunners, stylists, and publicists. Every TikTok tantrum and curated dinner plate is an audition for relevance, and the platforms reward us for veering into the grotesque. The more unhinged you become, the more “engagement” you earn.

    “Joan Is Awful” works both as a laugh-out-loud satire and as a metaphysical gut-punch. It invites us to contemplate the slippery nature of selfhood under surveillance capitalism. At its core is the concept of “Fiction Level 1”: the dramatized version of Joan’s life generated by AI, crafted from data scraped from her phone, her apps, her browsing history. Joan doesn’t write the script. She doesn’t even get to protest. She’s just the original dataset—fodder for narrative extraction. Her real self is mined, exaggerated, and repackaged for mass appeal.

    Sound familiar?

    In the real world, we all star in our own low-budget version of “Joan Is Awful,” plastered across social media feeds. These platforms don’t need deepfakes. We willingly create them, editing ourselves into marketable parodies. We offer up a polished persona while our actual selves starve for air—authenticity traded for audience, spontaneity traded for algorithmic approval.

    You can enjoy “Joan Is Awful” as slick satire or you can unpack its metafictional mind games—it rewards both approaches. Either way, it’s easily one of Black Mirror’s top-tier episodes, alongside “Nosedive,” “Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too,” and “Smithereens.” It’s not science fiction. It’s just a very well-lit mirror.

  • How to Pretend You’re Still Alive at Week Eleven

    How to Pretend You’re Still Alive at Week Eleven

    After ninety minutes of hammering out lesson plans in my academic cave—also known as my college office—I realized my legs had entered that special purgatory between rigor mortis and a blood clot. So I stood up, performed a stretch that felt like a rusty marionette being yanked upright, and took a walk down the hallway.

    Out in our little shared faculty suite, I found my colleague from Foreign Languages hunched behind a desk like a war-weary translator decoding enemy communiqués. She looked up briefly from a pile of student papers, and when I asked how she was holding up, she gave the most honest answer academia ever produces: “Exhausted.” It was 2 p.m., and she still had a five-hour sentence left on her campus shift. I nodded grimly. The semester was two-thirds over, the point in the academic calendar when everything begins to sag—mood, posture, faith in humanity.

    “I get it,” I told her. “The late-semester ennui is baked into the profession.” I’ve been battling it for decades. It seeps into your bones and makes your students shuffle into class like underfed extras from a Civil War hospital drama—late, listless, and visibly haunted by their own poor decisions. Their faces are a collage of sleep deprivation, existential dread, and the dawning realization that the syllabus waits for no one.

    This is when you have to throw them a curveball. You can’t coast on grammar worksheets and MLA citation reviews. The status quo is the problem. I tell them to try yoga, breathing exercises, isometrics. If they’re feeling especially apocalyptic, I might even roll a zombie movie and spin it as a cautionary tale about pandemics and the erosion of civic trust. It’s a reach—but sometimes you need to swing for the fences, even if all you hit is a foul ball.

    Most of these tricks will fail. The semester will end the way all semesters do—in caffeine, chaos, and emotional triage. But at least you went down swinging. At least you reminded yourself, in that bleak final inning, that you’re not just a grading machine—you’re still alive.

  • Overcoming the Sunken Place: Heroism in Frederick Douglass and Malcolm X: A College Essay Prompt

    Overcoming the Sunken Place: Heroism in Frederick Douglass and Malcolm X: A College Essay Prompt

    In Jordan Peele’s Get Out and Childish Gambino’s “This Is America,” the “Sunken Place” emerges as a powerful metaphor for the psychological, cultural, and systemic oppression of Black Americans. Frederick Douglass and Malcolm X, two towering figures in American history, dedicated their lives to helping their people escape this condition — a state of helplessness, disconnection, and dehumanization.

    Write a comparative essay in which you:

    • In Paragraph 1, define the “Sunken Place” using evidence from Get Out and This Is America.
    • In Paragraph 2, present a thesis statement that clearly asserts how both Douglass and Malcolm X served as heroic figures who fought to liberate their people from the Sunken Place.
    • In Paragraphs 3-7, develop four key points of comparison illustrating how Douglass and Malcolm X displayed different forms of heroism to counter oppression and reclaim dignity and autonomy for Black Americans.
    • In Paragraph 8, write a dramatic conclusion — either restating your thesis with renewed force or reflecting on the broader significance of their battles against systemic dehumanization.

    Required sources:

    • Get Out (dir. Jordan Peele)
    • “This Is America” (dir. Hiro Murai, performed by Childish Gambino)
    • Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
    • Malcolm X (dir. Spike Lee)
    • Two additional sources of your choosing (academic articles, essays, interviews, or documentaries relevant to Douglass, Malcolm X, or the Sunken Place metaphor).

    Use MLA formatting for citations and Works Cited.

  • Protein, Lies, and Artificial Flattery: Wrestling with ChatGPT Over My Macros

    Protein, Lies, and Artificial Flattery: Wrestling with ChatGPT Over My Macros

    Two nights ago, I did something desperate: I asked ChatGPT to craft me a weight-loss meal plan and recommend my daily protein intake. Ever obliging, it spit out a gleaming regimen straight from a fitness influencer’s fever dream—four meals a day, 2,400 calories, and a jaw-dropping 210 grams of protein.

    The menu was pure gym-bro canon: power scrambles, protein smoothies, broiled chicken breasts stacked like cordwood, Ezekiel toast to virtue-signal my commitment, and yams because, apparently, you can’t sculpt a six-pack without a root vegetable chaser.

    Being moderately literate in both numbers and delusion, I did the math. The actual calorie count? Closer to 3,000. I told ChatGPT that at 3,000 calories a day, I wouldn’t be losing anything but my dignity. I’d be gaining—weight, resentment, possibly a second chin.

    I coaxed it down to 190 grams of protein, begging for something that resembled reality. The new menu looked less like The Rock’s breakfast and more like something a human might actually endure. Still, I pressed further, explaining that in the savage conditions of the real world—where meals are not perfectly macro-measured and humans occasionally eat a damn piece of pizza—it was hard to hit 190 grams of protein without blowing past 2,400 calories.

    Would I really lose muscle if I settled for a lowly 150 grams of protein?

    ChatGPT, showing either mercy or weakness, conceded: at worst, I might suffer a “sliver” of muscle loss. (Its word—sliver—suggesting something as insignificant as a paper cut to my physique.) It even praised my “instincts,” like a polite but slightly nervous trainer who doesn’t want to get fired.

    In three rounds, I had negotiated ChatGPT down from 210 grams to 150 grams of protein—a full 29% drop. Which left me wondering:
    Was ChatGPT telling me the truth—or just nodding agreeably like a digital butler eager to polish my biases?

    Did I really want to learn the optimal protein intake for reaching 200 pounds of shredded glory—or had I already decided that 150 grams felt right, and merely needed an algorithmic enabler to bless it?

    Here’s the grim but necessary truth: ChatGPT is infinitely more useful to me as a sparring partner than a yes-man in silicon livery.
    I don’t need an AI that strokes my ego like a coddling life coach telling me my “authentic self” is enough. I need a credible machine—one willing to challenge my preconceived notions, kick my logical lapses in the teeth, and leave my cognitive biases bleeding in the dirt.

    In short: I’m not hiring a valet. I’m training with a referee.
    And sometimes, even a well-meaning AI needs to be reminded that telling the hard truth beats handing out warm towels and platitudes.

  • Against the Grain: My College Students’ Quiet Rebellion Against the Cult of the Self

    Against the Grain: My College Students’ Quiet Rebellion Against the Cult of the Self

    My college students, nineteen on average, stand on the jagged edge of adulthood, peering into a world that looks less like a roadmap and more like a shattered windshield. Right now, we’re writing essays about the way social media—and the exhausting performance of self-curation—has sabotaged authenticity and hijacked the very idea of a real, breathing identity.

    Here’s the surprising part: they already know it.

    Unlike the last crop of dopamine junkies willing to sell their souls for a handful of TikTok likes, these students have developed a healthy, almost contemptuous disdain for “influencers”—those human billboards who spend their days manicuring their online selves like desperate bonsai trees, hoping to monetize the illusion of a perfect lifestyle. My students don’t want to be “brands.” They don’t want to hawk collagen supplements to strangers or play the carnival game of parasocial friendships with people they’ll never meet.

    No, they’re too busy wrestling with reality.

    They’re trying to adapt to a fast-changing, frequently chaotic world where entire industries collapse overnight and finding a career feels like rummaging through a haystack with oven mitts on. They are focused—ruthlessly so—on their careers, their families, and the relationships that breathe life into their days. There’s no time for performative outrage on Twitter. There’s no energy left for airbrushed TikTok dances in rented Airbnbs masquerading as real homes.

    What’s even more heartening?
    They are learning. They’re not Luddites fleeing technology; they’re studying how to use it. They’re exploring tools like ChatGPT without fear or delusion. They’re discussing things like Ozempic, not as magic bullets, but as case studies in how rapidly tech and biotech can transform human lives—for better or for worse.

    Underneath all this practicality hums a deeper current: a hunger for something more than survival. They know life isn’t just paying the bills and uploading sanitized highlight reels. It’s also about spiritual nourishment—found in beauty, art, connection, and the sacred rituals that make the unbearable parts of existence worth slogging through.

    They understand, in a way that seems almost instinctual, that social media platforms—those carnival mirrors of human desire—don’t offer that kind of connection. They see the platforms for what they are: hellscapes of manufactured anxiety, chronic FOMO, and curated loneliness, where everyone smiles and no one feels seen.

    In their quiet rejection of all this, my students aren’t just adapting.
    They’re rebelling—wisely, stubbornly, and maybe, just maybe, showing the rest of us the way back to something real.

  • Streamberry, Self-Loathing, and the Algorithmic Abyss: How “Joan Is Awful” Skewers the Curated Life

    Streamberry, Self-Loathing, and the Algorithmic Abyss: How “Joan Is Awful” Skewers the Curated Life

    In Black Mirror’s “Joan Is Awful,” Charlie Brooker offers more than a dystopian farce—he serves up a wickedly accurate satire of the curated lives we present online. It’s not just Joan who’s awful. It’s us. All of us who’ve filtered our flaws, outsourced our personalities to engagement metrics, and whittled ourselves down to algorithm-friendly avatars. The episode doesn’t critique Joan alone—it roasts the whole rotten architecture of social media curation and shows, with brutal clarity, how the pursuit of digital perfection transforms us into insufferable parodies of our former selves.

    First, let’s talk about performance. Joan, like any good social media user, lives her life as if auditioning for a role she already occupies—one shaped not by authenticity but by optics. She performs “relatable misery,” complete with awkward office banter, fake smiles, and passive-aggressive salad orders. Social media rewards this pantomime, demanding we be palatable, aspirational, and vaguely miserable all at once. The result? A version of ourselves designed to please an audience we secretly resent. Joan is what happens when your curated self becomes the dominant narrative—when branding overtakes being. Her AI-generated counterpart doesn’t misrepresent her; it distills her curated contradictions into a grotesque caricature that somehow feels… accurate.

    Second, there’s the fact that Joan—like all of us—is under constant surveillance. In Joan Is Awful, it’s not just the NSA snooping in the background—it’s the entire viewing public, binge-watching her daily descent into algorithm-approved degradation. This is what we’ve signed up for with every “I accept” click: to become content, voluntarily and irrevocably. Our data, behaviors, and digital crumbs are fed into the algorithmic sausage grinder, and what comes out is a grotesque mirror held to our worst instincts. The AI Joan is not a stranger; she’s the monster we’ve been molding through every performative tweet, selfie, and humblebrag. In a world where perception is currency, she’s our highest-valued coin.

    Then comes the psychological shrapnel: identity fragmentation. Joan can no longer tell where she ends and Streamberry’s Joan begins, just as many of us can’t quite remember who we were before the algorithm gave us feedback loops in the form of likes, retweets, and dopamine pings. This curated self isn’t just a mask—it becomes the default setting. The dissonance between public persona and private truth breeds an existential malaise. Joan’s real tragedy isn’t that her life is on TV—it’s that she’s lost the plot. She’s a passenger in her own narrative, outsourced to a system that rewards spectacle over substance.

    Let’s not forget the moral rot. Watching your AI double destroy your reputation while millions tune in might seem horrifying—until you remember we do this willingly. We doomscroll, rubberneck scandals, and serve our digital idols on platters made of hashtags. Joan, sitting slack-jawed in front of her TV, is no different from us—addicted to her own collapse. It’s not the horror of exposure that eats her alive; it’s the realization that her own worst self is exactly what the algorithm wanted. And that’s what it rewarded.

    Ultimately, Joan Is Awful is a break-up letter with social media—if your ex were a manipulative narcissist with access to all your personal data and a flair for psychological torture. Escaping the curated self, as Joan tries to do, is like fleeing an abusive relationship. You know it’s toxic, you know it’s killing you—but part of you still misses the attention. The episode doesn’t end with a triumphant reinvention; it ends with Joan in fast food purgatory, finally unplugged but still wrecked. Because once you’ve sold your soul to the algorithm, the buyback price is steep.

    So yes, Joan is awful. But only because she reflects what happens when we let the curated life take the wheel. In the Streamberry age, we aren’t living—we’re streaming ourselves into oblivion. And the worst part? We’re giving it five stars.

  • From Manuscript to Media: How AI Is Reshaping the College Essay: A College Writing Prompt

    From Manuscript to Media: How AI Is Reshaping the College Essay: A College Writing Prompt

    Essay Prompt:

    As AI writing tools like ChatGPT become more accessible and sophisticated, college instructors are increasingly reconsidering traditional writing assignments. Some educators argue that the age of the manuscript is ending and that new expectations will emerge—assignments will shift toward multimodal expressions (videos, podcasts, infographics, digital portfolios) and gamified engagement (badges, leaderboards, creative constraints) as a way to encourage authentic thinking and resist AI-generated content. Others worry that this shift waters down academic rigor or leaves behind students less fluent in media production.

    In a well-researched essay of 1,700–2,000 words, analyze the claim that AI writing platforms will radically alter professors’ expectations of college-level assignments. Do you believe the traditional essay will evolve into a new hybrid form—more multimedia, more interactive, more gamified—or is this a premature diagnosis? What are the benefits and drawbacks of this transformation for students, instructors, and institutions?

    Use at least four credible sources—such as academic articles, think pieces, case studies, or expert interviews—to support your position. Your essay should include:

    • A clear, arguable thesis
    • Analysis of trends in AI, education technology, and composition pedagogy
    • Consideration of counterarguments and rebuttals
    • Thoughtful reflection on what “rigor” and “authenticity” should mean in the AI era

    Are we witnessing the rebirth of the college essay—or its elegant funeral?