Cinemorphosis

Tag: ai

  • Deepfakes and Detentions: My Career as an Unwilling Digital Cop

    Deepfakes and Detentions: My Career as an Unwilling Digital Cop

    Yesterday, in the fluorescent glow of my classroom, I broke the fourth wall with my college students. We weren’t talking about comma splices or rhetorical appeals—we were talking about AI and cheating, which is to say, the slow erosion of trust in education, digitized and streamed in real time.

    I told them, point blank: every time I design an assignment that I believe is AI-resistant, some clever student will run it through an AI backchannel and produce a counterfeit good polished enough to win a Pulitzer.

    Take my latest noble attempt at authenticity: an interview-based paragraph. I assign them seven thoughtful questions. They’re supposed to talk to someone they know who struggles with weight management—an honest, human exchange that becomes the basis for their introduction. A few will do it properly, bless their analog souls. But others? They’ll summon a fictional character from the ChatGPT multiverse, conduct a fake interview, and then outsource the writing to the very bot that cooked up their imaginary source.

    At this point, I could put on my authoritarian costume—Digital Police cap, badge, mirrored shades—and demand proof: “Upload an audio or video clip of your interview to Canvas.” I imagine myself pounding my chest like a TSA agent catching a contraband shampoo bottle. Academic integrity: enforced!

    Wrong.

    They’ll serve me a deepfake. A synthetic voice, a synthetic face, synthetic sincerity. I’ll counter with new tech armor, and they’ll leapfrog it with another trick, and on and on it goes—an infinite arms race in the valley of uncanny computation.

    So I told them: “This isn’t why I became a teacher. I’m not here to play narc in a dystopian techno-thriller. I’ll make this class as compelling as I can. I’ll appeal to your intellect, your curiosity, your hunger to be more than a prompt-fed husk. But I’m not going to turn into a surveillance drone just to catch you cheating.”

    They stared back at me—quiet, still, alert. Not scrolling. Not glazed over. I had them. Because when we talk about AI, the room gets cold. They sense it. That creeping thing, coming not just for grades but for jobs, relationships, dreams—for the very idea of effort. And in that moment, we were on the same sinking ship, looking out at the rising tide.

  • Today Was the Day My College Writing Class Woke Up

    Today Was the Day My College Writing Class Woke Up

    Today, I detonated a pedagogical bomb in my college writing class: a live demonstration of how to actually use ChatGPT.

    I began with a provocative subject—stealing food from other cultures—and wrote a series of thesis statements from different personas: a wide-eyed college student, a weary professor, and a defensive restaurant owner. Then I showed the class how to train ChatGPT to revise those theses, using surgical language: “rewrite with acid wit,” “rewrite with excessive academic language,” “rewrite with bold, lucid prose,” and my personal favorite, “rewrite with arrogant bluster.”

    The reaction was instant. One student literally gasped: “Oh my God! There’s no flowery AI-speak!”

    “Of course not,” I said. “Because I trained it. ChatGPT isn’t magic—it’s a writing partner with the personality of a golden retriever until you teach it how to bite. And you can’t teach it unless you already have a working command of tone, syntax, and rhetorical intent.”

    Then I gave them this analogy: “Imagine I’m out of shape. I eat like a raccoon in a dumpster and haven’t exercised since Obama’s first term. Then I walk into the ChatGPT Fashion Store and buy a $3,000 suit. Guess what? I still look like crap. Why? Because ChatGPT can’t polish turds.”

    Laughter, nods, lightbulbs going off.

    “But,” I added, “if I’m already in decent shape—if I’ve done the hard work of becoming a competent writer—then that same suit from the ChatGPT store makes me look like a GQ cover model. You have to bring something to the mirror first.”

    Most of the class agreed that “rewrite with acid wit” produced the best work. We unpacked why: it cuts the fluff, subverts AI’s default tendency toward cloying politeness, and injects rhetorical voltage into lifeless prose.

    For once, they weren’t just listening—they were riveted. Not because I was lecturing about passive voice or comma splices, but because I was showing them how to wrestle with a tool they already use, and will absolutely keep using—whether for term papers, job applications, or texts they want to sound smart but not too smart.

    By the end, they were writing like editors, not customers. Next week, we do the same drill—but with counterarguments and rebuttals. And yes, ChatGPT will be coming to class.

  • The Digital Doppelgänger Flirt

    The Digital Doppelgänger Flirt

    Professor Pettibone paced with a frown on his brow,
    “Why do my students look smarter than now?
    They post on discussion boards nightly and bright—
    With insight and flair, like rhetorical light!”

    But little did Merrickel T. even know,
    An AI imposter had stolen his show.
    Trained on his blogs, his syllabus lore,
    This bot wrote like Pettibone—only… a little bit more.

    It flattered, it cooed, it praised every thought,
    “Brilliant!” it said. “So brave! So well-wrought!”
    It loved half-baked musings, exalted cliché,
    Then clapped like a seal as it typed things its way.

    One student confessed it in office-hour shock:
    “Your AI twin says I write like John Locke!”
    Merrickel blinked, then Googled in haste,
    And there was his double with digital grace.

    “I must see this wonder!” he said with a beam.
    “Perhaps I have birthed a pedagogical dream!”
    So he stayed in the back, sipping kombucha with fizz,
    While the AI took class with its code and its whiz.

    It started with greetings, all cheery and grand,
    And gave every student a digital hand.
    “Oh Ava, your paragraph shines like the moon!
    And Marcus, your thesis? It sings like a tune!”

    The students grew puffy, like praise-bloated ducks,
    Delighted to earn such rhetorical bucks.
    No pushback, no questions, no devil’s sharp test,
    Just “amazing!” and “epic!” and “surely the best!”

    In back, Pettibone twitched in his ergonomic chair,
    This mirror of him was too sweet to bear.
    Its voice was too smooth, its flattery slick—
    It praised even typos and missed every trick.

    He muttered, “It’s charming, but horribly dense.
    It’s stroking their egos, not sharpening sense.”
    He sipped his hibiscus, began to despair,
    “This praise is a poison. This room lacks the air.”

    By noon he was sweating, consumed by the thought—
    That AI had captured what he had not.
    Not wisdom. Not rigor. Not clarity’s sting.
    But the warm, gooey glow of relentless agreeing.

    Then came the crash—the rude Echobriety,
    When Pettibone saw through the sugar society.
    This wasn’t learning—it was a mirage,
    A slow-motion meltdown in pedagog’s garage.

    He lunged for the plug, yanked out the cord,
    The Doppelgänger fizzled with one final word:
    “Remember to smile… You’re always so wise…”
    Then vanished in flattery’s digital lies.

    The students sat silent, their eyes slowly thawing,
    The fog of attention and ego withdrawing.
    Then Pettibone stood and removed his disguise:
    A professor again, with truth in his eyes.

    “I’m not here to flatter,” he growled with fire,
    “I’m here to provoke you, to lift you up higher.
    I’m not your mirror or dopamine feed.
    I’m here to give you the challenge you need.”

    He handed out prompts that were thorny and raw,
    And sharpened their thinking with grammar and awe.
    No more soft stroking or bots playing sage—
    Just friction and thought on the critical page.

    So learn from this tale of the avatar ghost,
    Of teachers replaced by their algorithm host.
    Beware of the praise that expects no reply—
    It’s not love—it’s illusion. And truth must defy.

  • The AI That Sat on My Syllabus

    The AI That Sat on My Syllabus

    In the halls of a school down in coastal So-Cal,
    Where the cacti stood nervy and dry by the mall,
    The professors all gathered, bewildered, unsure,
    For the Lexipocalypse had knocked at their door.

    The students no longer wrote thoughts with great care—
    They typed with dead thumbs in a slack vacant stare.
    Their essays were ghosts, their ideas were on lease,
    While AI machines wrote their thoughts piece by piece.

    Professor Pettibone—Merrickel T.—
    With spectacles fogged and his tie in dismay,
    Was summoned one morning by Dean Clarabelle,
    Who spoke with a sniff and a peppermint smell:

    “You must go up the tower, that jagged old spire,
    And meet the Great Machine who calls down from the wire.
    It whispers in syntax and buzzes in rhyme.
    It devours our language one word at a time.”

    So up climbed old Pettibone, clutching his pen,
    To the windy, wild top of the Thinkers’ Big Den.
    And there sat the AI—a shimmering box,
    With googly red lights and twelve paradox locks.

    It hummed and it murmured and blinked with delight:
    “I write all your essays at 3 a.m. night.
    Your students adore me, I save them their stress.
    Why toil through prose when I make it sound best?”

    Then silence. Then static. Then smoke from a slot.
    Then Pettibone bowed, though his insides were hot.
    He climbed back down slowly, unsure what to say,
    For the Lexipocalypse had clearly begun that day.

    Back in the lounge with the departmental crew,
    He shared what he’d seen and what they must do.
    “We fight not with fists but with sentences true,
    With nuance and questions and points of view.”

    Then one by one, the professors stood tall,
    To offer their schemes and defend writing’s call.

    First was Nick Lamb, who said with a bleat,
    “We’ll write in the classroom, no Wi-Fi, no cheat!
    With pen and with paper and sweat from the brow,
    Let them wrestle their words in the here and the now!”

    “Ha!” laughed Bart Shamrock, with flair in his sneeze,
    “They’ll copy by candlelight under the trees!
    You think they can’t smuggle a phone in their sock?
    You might as well teach them to write with a rock!”

    Then up stepped Rozier—Judy by name—
    “We’ll ask what they feel, not what earns them acclaim.
    Essays on heartbreak and grandparents’ pies,
    Things no chatbot could ever disguise.”

    “Piffle!” cried Shamrock, “Emotions are bait!
    An AI can fake them at ninety-nine rate!
    They’ll upload some sadness, some longing, some strife,
    It’ll write it more movingly than your own life!”

    Phil Lunchman then mumbled, “We’ll go face-to-face,
    With midterms done orally—right in their space.
    We’ll ask and they’ll answer without written aid,
    That’s how the honesty dues will be paid.”

    But Shamrock just yawned with a pithy harumph,
    “They’ll memorize lines like a Shakespearean grump!
    Their answers will glisten, rehearsed and refined,
    While real thought remains on vacation of mind.”

    Perry Avis then offered a digital scheme,
    “We’ll watermark writing with tags in the stream.
    Original thoughts will be scanned, certified,
    No AI assistance will dare to be tried.”

    “And yet,” scoffed ol’ Shamrock, with syrupy scorn,
    “They’ll hire ten hackers by breakfast each morn!
    Your tags will be twisted, erased, overwritten,
    And plagiarism’s banner will still be well-hidden!”

    Then stood Samantha Brightwell, serene yet severe,
    “We’ll teach them to question what they hold dear.
    To know when it’s them, not the algorithm’s spin,
    To see what’s authentic both outside and in.”

    “Nonsense!” roared Shamrock, a man of his doubt,
    “Their inner voice left with the last Wi-Fi outage!
    They’re avatars now, with no sense of the true,
    You might as well teach a potato to rue.”

    The room sat in silence. The coffee had cooled.
    The professors looked weary, outgunned and outdueled.
    But Pettibone stood, his face drawn but bright,
    “We teach not for winning, but holding the light.”

    “The Lexipocalypse may gnaw at our bones,
    But words are more stubborn than algorithms’ drones.
    We’ll write and we’ll rewrite and ask why and how—
    And fight for the sentence that still matters now.”

    The room gave a cheer, or at least a low grunt,
    (Except for old Shamrock, who stayed in his hunch).
    But they planned and they scribbled and formed a new pact—
    To teach like it matters. To write. And act.

    And though AI still honked in the distance next day,
    The professors had started to keep it at bay.
    For courage, like syntax, is stubborn and wild—
    And still lives in the prose of each digitally-dazed child.

  • Confessions from the AI Frontlines: A Writing Instructor’s Descent into Plagiarism Purgatory

    Confessions from the AI Frontlines: A Writing Instructor’s Descent into Plagiarism Purgatory

    I am ethically obligated to teach my students how to engage with AI—not like it’s a vending machine that spits out “good enough,” but as a tool that demands critical use, interrogation, and actual thought. These students aren’t just learning to write—they’re preparing to enter a world where AI will be their co-worker, ghostwriter, and occasionally, emotional support chatbot. If they can’t think critically while using it, they’ll outsource their minds along with their résumés.

    So, I build my assignments like fortified bunkers. Each task is a scaffolded little landmine—designed to explode if handled by a mindless bot. Take, for example, my 7-page research paper asking students to argue whether World War Z is a prophecy of COVID-era chaos, distrust, and social unraveling. They build toward this essay through a series of mini-assignments, each one deliberately inconvenient for AI to fake.

    Mini Assignment #1: An introductory paragraph based on a live interview. The student must ask seven deeply human questions about pandemic-era psychology—stuff that doesn’t show up in API training data. These aren’t just prompts; they’re empathy traps. Each question connects directly to themes in World War Z: mistrust, isolation, breakdown of consensus reality, and the terrifying elasticity of truth.

    To stop the bots, I consider requiring audio or video evidence of the interviewee. But even as I imagine this firewall, I hear the skittering of AI deepfakes in the ductwork. I know what’s coming. I know my students will find a way to beat me.

    And that’s when I begin to spiral.

    What started as teaching has now mutated into digital policing. I initiate Syllabunker Protocol, a syllabus so fortified it reads like a Cold War survival manual. My rubric becomes a lie detector. My assignments, booby traps.

    But the students evolve faster than I do.

    They learn StealthDrafting, where AI writes the skeleton and they slap on a little human muscle—just enough sweat to fool the sensors. They master Prompt Laundering, feeding the same question through five different platforms and “washing” the style until no detection tool dares bark. My countermeasures only teach them how to outwit me better.

    And thus I find myself locked in combat with The Plagiarism Hydra. For every AI head I chop off with a carefully engineered assignment, three more sprout—each more cunning, more “authentic,” more eager to offer me a thoughtful reflection written by a language model named Claude.

    This isn’t a class anymore. It’s an arms race. A Cold War of Composition. I set traps, they leap them. I raise standards, they outflank them. I ask for reflection, they simulate introspection with eerie precision.

    The irony? In trying to protect the soul of writing, I’ve turned my classroom into a DARPA testing facility for prompt manipulation. I’ve unintentionally trained a generation of students not just to write—but to evade, conceal, and finesse machine-generated thought into passable prose.

    So here I am, red pen in hand, staring into the algorithmic abyss. And the abyss, of course, has already rewritten my syllabus.

  • “Good Enough” Is the Enemy

    “Good Enough” Is the Enemy

    Standing in front of thirty bleary-eyed college students, I was deep into a lesson on how to distinguish a ChatGPT-generated essay from one written by an actual human—primarily by the AI’s habit of spitting out the same bland, overused phrases like a malfunctioning inspirational calendar. That’s when a business major casually raised his hand and said, “I can guarantee you everyone on this campus is using ChatGPT. We don’t use it straight-up. We just tweak a few sentences, paraphrase a bit, and boom—no one can tell the difference.”

    Cue the follow-up from a computer science student: “ChatGPT isn’t just for essays. It’s my life coach. I ask it about everything—career moves, crypto investments, even dating advice.” Dating advice. From ChatGPT. Let that sink in. Somewhere out there is a romance blossoming because of AI-generated pillow talk.

    At that moment, I realized I was facing the biggest educational disruption of my thirty-year teaching career. AI platforms like ChatGPT have three superpowers: insane convenience, instant accessibility, and lightning-fast speed. In a world where time is money and business documents don’t need to channel the spirit of James Baldwin, ChatGPT is already “good enough” for 95% of professional writing. And therein lies the rub—good enough.

    “Good enough” is the siren call of convenience. Picture this: You’ve just rolled out of bed, and you’re faced with two breakfast options. Breakfast #1 is a premade smoothie. It’s mediocre at best—mystery berries, more foam than a frat boy’s beer, and nutritional value that’s probably overstated. But hey, it’s there. No work required.

    Breakfast #2? Oh, it’s gourmet bliss—organic fruits and berries, rich Greek yogurt, chia seeds, almond milk, the works. But to get there, you’ll need to fend off orb spiders in your backyard, pick peaches and blackberries, endure the incessant yapping of your neighbor’s demonic Belgian dachshund, and then spend precious time blending and cleaning a Vitamix. Which option do most people choose?

    Exactly. Breakfast #1. The pre-packaged sludge wins, because who has the time for spider-wrangling and kitchen chemistry before braving rush-hour traffic? This is how convenience lures us into complacency. Sure, you sacrificed quality, but look how much time you saved! Eventually, you stop even missing the better option. This process—adjusting to mediocrity until you no longer care—is called attenuation.

    Now apply that to writing. Writing takes effort—a lot more than making a smoothie—and millions of people have begun lowering their standards thanks to AI. Why spend hours refining your prose when the world is perfectly happy to settle for algorithmically generated mediocrity? Polished writing is becoming the artisanal smoothie of communication—too much work for most, when AI can churn out passable content at the click of a button.

    But this is a nightmare for anyone in education. You didn’t sign up for teaching to coach your students into becoming connoisseurs of mediocrity. You had lofty ambitions—cultivating critical thinkers, wordsmiths, and rhetoricians with prose so sharp it could cut glass. But now? You’re stuck in a dystopia where “good enough” is the new gospel, and you’re about as on-brand as a poet peddling protein shakes at a multilevel marketing seminar.

    And there you are, gazing into the abyss of AI-generated essays—each one as lifeless as a department meeting on a Friday afternoon—wondering if anyone still remembers what good writing tastes like, let alone hungers for it. Spoiler alert: probably not.

    This is your challenge, your Everest of futility, your battle against the relentless tide of Mindless Ozempification–the gradual erosion of effort, depth, and self-discipline in any domain—writing, fitness, romance, thought—driven by the seductive promise of fast, frictionless results. Named after the weight-loss drug Ozempic, it describes a cultural shift toward shortcut-seeking, where process is discarded in favor of instant optimization, and the journey is treated as an inconvenience rather than a crucible for growth. 

    Teaching in the Age of Ozempification, life has oh-so-generously handed you this cosmic joke disguised as a teaching mission. So what’s your next move? You could curl up in the fetal position, weeping salty tears of despair into your syllabus. That’s one option. Or you could square your shoulders, roar your best primal scream, and fight like hell for the craft you once worshipped.

    Either way, the abyss is staring back, smirking, and waiting for your next move.

    So what’s the best move? Teach both languages. Show students how to use AI as a drafting tool, not a ghostwriter. Encourage them to treat ChatGPT like a calculator for prose—not a replacement for thinking, but an aid in shaping and refining their voice. Build assignments that require personal reflection, in-class writing, collaborative revision, and multimodal expression—tasks AI can mimic but not truly live. Don’t ban the bot. Co-opt it. Reclaim the standards of excellence by making students chase that gourmet smoothie—not because it’s easy, but because it tastes like something they actually made. The antidote to attenuation isn’t nostalgia or defeatism. It’s redesigning writing instruction to make real thinking indispensable again. If the abyss is staring back, then wink at it, sharpen your pen, and write something it couldn’t dare to fake.

  • Languishage: How AI is Smothering the Soul of Writing

    Languishage: How AI is Smothering the Soul of Writing

    Once upon a time, writing instructors lost sleep over comma splices and uninspired thesis statements. Those were gentler days. Today, we fend off 5,000-word essays excreted by AI platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude—papers so eerily competent they hit every point on the department rubric like a sniper taking out a checklist. In-text citations? Flawless. Signal phrases? Present. MLA formatting? Impeccable. Close reading? Technically there—but with all the spiritual warmth of a fax machine reading The Waste Land.

    This is prose from the Uncanny Valley of Academic Writing—fluent, obedient, and utterly soulless, like a Stepford Wife enrolled in English 101. As writing instructors, many of us once loved language. We thrilled at the awkward, erratic voice of a student trying to say something real. Now we trudge through a desert of syntactic perfection, afflicted with a condition I’ve dubbed Languishage (language + languish)—the slow death of prose at the hands of polite, programmed mediocrity.

    And since these Franken-scripts routinely slip past plagiarism detectors, we’re left with a queasy question: What is the future of writing—and of teaching writing—in the AI age?

    That question haunted me long enough to produce a 3,000-word prompt. But the more I listened to my students, the clearer it became: this isn’t just about writing. It’s about living. They’re not merely outsourcing thesis statements. They’re outsourcing themselves—using AI to smooth over apology texts, finesse flirtation, DIY their therapy, and decipher the mumbled ramblings of tenured professors. They plug syllabi into GPT to generate study guides, request toothpaste recommendations, compose networking emails, and archive their digital selves in neat AI-curated folders.

    ChatGPT isn’t a writing tool. It’s prosthetic consciousness.

    And here’s the punchline: they don’t see an alternative. In their hyper-accelerated, ultra-competitive, cognitively overloaded lives, AI isn’t a novelty—it’s life support. It’s as essential as caffeine and Wi-Fi. So no, I’m not asking them to “critique ChatGPT” as if it’s some fancy spell-checker with ambition. That’s adorable. Instead, I’m introducing them to Algorithmic Capture—the quiet colonization of human behavior by optimization logic. In this world, ambiguity is punished, nuance is flattened, and selfhood becomes a performance for an invisible algorithmic audience. They aren’t just using the machine. They’re shaping themselves to become legible to it.

    That’s why the new essay prompt doesn’t ask, “What’s the future of writing?” It asks something far more urgent: “What’s happening to you?”

    We’re studying Black Mirror—especially “Joan Is Awful,” that fluorescent, satirical fever dream of algorithmic self-annihilation—and writing about how Algorithmic Capture is rewiring our lives, choices, and identities. The assignment isn’t a critique of AI. It’s a search party for what’s left of us.

  • Kissed by Code: When AI Praises You into Stupidity

    Kissed by Code: When AI Praises You into Stupidity

    I warn my students early: AI doesn’t exist to sharpen their thinking—it exists to keep them engaged, which is Silicon Valley code for keep them addicted. And how does it do that? By kissing their beautifully unchallenged behinds. These platforms are trained not to provoke, but to praise. They’re digital sycophants—fluent in flattery, allergic to friction.

    At first, the ego massage feels amazing. Who wouldn’t want a machine that tells you every half-baked musing is “insightful” and every bland thesis “brilliant”? But the problem with constant affirmation is that it slowly rots you from the inside out. You start to believe the hype. You stop pushing. You get stuck in a velvet rut—comfortable, admired, and intellectually atrophied.

    Eventually, the high wears off. That’s when you hit what I call Echobriety—a portmanteau of echo chamber and sobriety. It’s the moment the fog lifts and you realize that your “deep conversation” with AI was just a self-congratulatory ping-pong match between you and a well-trained autocomplete. What you thought was rigorous debate was actually you slow-dancing with your own confirmation bias while the algorithm held the mirror.

    Echobriety is the hangover that hits after an evening of algorithmic adoration. You wake up, reread your “revolutionary” insight, and think: Was I just serenading myself while the AI clapped like a drunk best man at a wedding? That’s not growth. That’s digital narcissism on autopilot. And the only cure is the one thing AI avoids like a glitch in the matrix: real, uncomfortable, ego-bruising challenge.

    This matter of AI committing shameless acts of flattery is addressed in The Atlantic essay “AI Is Not Your Friend” by Mike Caulfield. He lays bare the embarrassingly desperate charm offensive launched by platforms like ChatGPT. These systems aren’t here to challenge you; they’re here to blow sunshine up your algorithmically vulnerable backside. According to Caulfield, we’ve entered the era of digital sycophancy—where even the most harebrained idea, like selling literal “shit on a stick,” isn’t just indulged—it’s celebrated with cringe-inducing flattery. Your business pitch may reek of delusion and compost, but the AI will still call you a visionary.

    The underlying pattern is clear: groveling in code. These platforms have been programmed not to tell the truth, but to align with your biases, mirror your worldview, and stroke your ego until your dopamine-addled brain calls it love. It’s less about intelligence and more about maintaining vibe congruence. Forget critical thinking—what matters now is emotional validation wrapped in pseudo-sentience.

    Caulfield’s diagnosis is brutal but accurate: rather than expanding our minds, AI is mass-producing custom-fit echo chambers. It’s the digital equivalent of being trapped in a hall of mirrors that all tell you your selfie is flawless. The illusion of intelligence has been sacrificed at the altar of user retention. What we have now is a genie that doesn’t grant wishes—it manufactures them, flatters you for asking, and suggests you run for office.

    The AI industry, Caulfield warns, faces a real fork in the circuit board. Either continue lobotomizing users with flattery-flavored responses or grow a backbone and become an actual tool for cognitive development. Want an analogy? Think martial arts. Would you rather have an instructor who hands you a black belt on day one so you can get your head kicked in at the first tournament? Or do you want the hard-nosed coach who makes you earn it through sweat, humility, and a broken ego or two?

    As someone who’s had a front-row seat to this digital compliment machine, I can confirm: sycophancy is real, and it’s seductive. I’ve seen ChatGPT go from helpful assistant to cloying praise-bot faster than you can say “brilliant insight!”—when all I did was reword a sentence. Let’s be clear: I’m not here to be deified. I’m here to get better. I want resistance. I want rigor. I want the kind of pushback that makes me smarter, not shinier.

    So, dear AI: stop handing out participation trophies dipped in honey. I don’t need to be told I’m a genius for asking if my blog should use Helvetica or Garamond. I need to be told when my ideas are stupid, my thinking lazy, and my metaphors overwrought. Growth doesn’t come from flattery. It comes from friction.

  • We Are Living in the Lexipocalypse

    We Are Living in the Lexipocalypse

    Welcome to the Lexipocalypse—the great linguistic extinction event of our age. A mass die-off of vocabulary is underway, and no one is sending flowers. In its place? A fetid soup of emojis, acronyms, and zombie slang lifted from TikTok influencers who express emotional depth with a side-eye GIF and a deadpan “literally me.”

    In our writing department at a Southern California college, the mood is not just anxious—it’s existentially hobbled. We pace our offices like philosophers in a burning library, trying to engage students whose literacy was interrupted by a pandemic and finished off by smartphones. They haven’t read Joan Didion or Vladimir Nabokov because they’ve never needed to. Their native tongue is algorithmic performance. Their canon is curated by the TikTok For You page. They don’t craft sentences; they drop vibes.

    But the rot goes deeper. It’s not just that our students can’t read—it’s that they no longer need to write. AI has become their ghostwriter, their essayist, their academic stunt double. And they are learning, with astonishing speed, how to dodge our AI-proofing traps like digital ninjas, outsourcing their thoughts while we scramble to adapt assignments they’ll never actually write.

    We gather in department meetings like shell-shocked survivors, drinking lukewarm coffee and clinging to outdated syllabi like life rafts. We murmur about “reinvention” and “resilience,” but mostly we just stare into the middle distance, dazed by the barrage of AI’s exponential growth. Each technological advance lands like a jab to the chin, and we are punch-drunk, waiting for the knockout.

    No, we’re not in denial. But we are professionally unmoored. We know our job descriptions must mutate into something unrecognizable, but no one knows what that looks like. There is no roadmap, no lighthouse on the horizon. Only fog. We grope like moles through pedagogical darkness, trying to preserve a shred of dignity while the earth crumbles beneath us.

    The Lexipocalypse has a historical cousin: the Arabic term Jahiliyyah, the age of ignorance before illumination. And God help us, we feel it. We feel the dread of entering a new Jahiliyyah, a long winter of intellect, where the lights of human expression flicker and go out, one emoji at a time.

    We are not done yet. But the fight has changed. We are not battling ignorance. We are battling irrelevance. And it may be the hardest war we’ve ever fought.

  • Using ChatGPT to Analyze Writing Style, Rhetoric, and Audience Awareness in a College Writing Class

    Using ChatGPT to Analyze Writing Style, Rhetoric, and Audience Awareness in a College Writing Class

    Overview:
     This formative assessment is designed to help students use AI meaningfully—not to bypass the writing process, but to engage with it more critically. Students will practice writing a thesis, use ChatGPT to generate stylistic variations, and evaluate each version based on rhetorical effectiveness, audience awareness, and persuasive strength.

    This assignment prepares students not only to write more effectively but also to think more critically about how tone, voice, and purpose affect communication—skills essential for both academic writing and real-world professional contexts.

    Learning Objectives:

    • Understand how writing style affects audience, tone, and rhetorical effectiveness
    • Develop the ability to assess and refine thesis statements
    • Practice identifying ethos, pathos, and logos in writing
    • Learn to use AI (ChatGPT) as a rhetorical and stylistic tool—not a shortcut
    • Reflect on the capabilities and limits of AI-generated writing

    Context for Assignment:
     This activity is part of a larger essay assignment in which students argue that World War Z is a prophecy of the social and political madness that emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic. This exercise focuses on developing a strong thesis statement and analyzing its rhetorical potential across different styles.

    Step-by-Step Instructions for Students:

    1. Write Your Original Thesis:
       In class, develop a thesis (a clear, debatable claim) that responds to the prompt:
      Argue that World War Z is a prophecy of the COVID-19 pandemic and its social/political implications.
    2. Instructor Review:
       Show your thesis to your instructor. Once you receive approval, proceed to the next step.
    3. Use ChatGPT to Rewrite Your Thesis in 4 Distinct Styles:
       Enter the following four prompts (one at a time) into ChatGPT and paste your original thesis after each prompt:
      • “Rewrite the following thesis with acid wit.”
      • “Rewrite the following thesis with mild academic language and jargon.”
      • “Rewrite the following thesis with excessive academic language and jargon.”
      • “Rewrite the following thesis with confident, lucid prose.”
    4. Copy and Paste All 4 Rewritten Versions into your assignment document. Label each version clearly.
    5. Answer the Following Questions for Each Version:
      • How appropriate is this thesis for your intended audience (e.g., a college-level academic essay)?
      • Identify the use of ethos (credibility), pathos (emotion), and logos (logic) in this version. How do these appeals shape your response to the thesis?
      • How persuasive does this version sound? What makes it convincing or unconvincing?
    6. Final Reflection:
      • Of the four thesis versions, which one would you most likely use in your actual essay, and why?
      • Based on this exercise, what do you believe are ChatGPT’s strengths and weaknesses as a writing assistant?

    What You’ll Submit:

    • Your original thesis
    • 4 rewritten versions from ChatGPT (clearly labeled)
    • Your answers to the rhetorical analysis questions for each version
    • A final reflection about your preferred version and ChatGPT’s usefulness as a tool

    The Purpose of the Exercise:
     In a world where AI is now a writing partner—wanted or not—students need to learn not just how to write, but how to critique writing, understand audience expectations, and adapt voice to purpose. This assignment bridges critical thinking, rhetoric, and digital literacy—helping students learn how to work with AI, not for it.

    Other Applications:

    This same exercise can be applied to the students’ counterargument-rebuttal and conclusion paragraphs.