Cinemorphosis

Tag: artificial-intelligence

  • Bad But Worth It? De-skilling in the Age of AI (college essay prompt)

    Bad But Worth It? De-skilling in the Age of AI (college essay prompt)

    AI is now deeply embedded in business, the arts, and education. We use it to write, edit, translate, summarize, and brainstorm. This raises a central question: when does AI meaningfully extend our abilities, and when does it quietly erode them?

    In “The Age of De-Skilling,” Kwame Anthony Appiah argues that not all de-skilling is equal. Some forms are corrosive and hollow us out; some are “bad but worth it” because the benefits outweigh the loss; some are so destructive that no benefit can redeem them. In that framework, AI becomes most interesting when we talk about strategic de-skilling: deliberately off-loading certain tasks to machines so we can focus on deeper, higher-level work.

    Write a 1,700-word argumentative essay in which you defend, refute, or complicate the claim that not all dependence on AI is harmful. Take a clear position on whether AI can function as a “bad but worth it” form of de-skilling that frees us for more meaningful thinking—or whether, in practice, it mostly dulls our edge and trains us into passivity.

    Your essay must:

    • Engage directly with Appiah’s concepts of corrosive vs. “bad but worth it” de-skilling.
    • Distinguish between lazy dependence on AI and deliberate collaboration with it.
    • Include a counterargument–rebuttal section that uses at least one example of what we might call Ozempification—people becoming less agents and more “users” of systems. You may draw this example from one or more of the following Black Mirror episodes: “Joan Is Awful,” “Nosedive,” or “Smithereens.”
    • Use at least three sources in MLA format, including Appiah and at least one Black Mirror episode.

    For your supporting paragraphs, you might consider:

    • Cognitive off-loading as optimization
    • Human–AI collaboration in creative or academic work
    • Ethical limits of automation
    • How AI is redefining what counts as “skill”

    Your goal is to show nuanced critical thinking about AI’s role in human skill development. Don’t just declare AI good or bad; use Appiah’s framework to examine when AI’s shortcuts lead to degradation—and when, if used wisely, they might lead to liberation.

    3 building-block paragraph assignments

    1. Concept Paragraph: Explaining Appiah’s De-Skilling Framework

    Assignment:
     Write one well-developed paragraph (8–10 sentences) in which you explain Kwame Anthony Appiah’s distinctions among corrosive de-skilling, “bad but worth it” de-skilling, and de-skilling that is so destructive no benefit can justify it.

    • Use at least one short, embedded quotation from Appiah.
    • Paraphrase his ideas in your own words and clarify the differences between the three categories.
    • End the paragraph by briefly suggesting how AI might fit into one of these categories (without fully arguing your position yet).

    Your goal is to show that you understand Appiah’s framework clearly enough to use it later as the backbone of an argument.

    2. Definition Paragraph: Lazy Dependence vs. Deliberate Collaboration

    Assignment:
     Write one paragraph in which you define and contrast lazy dependence on AI and deliberate collaboration with AI in your own words.

    • Begin with a clear topic sentence that sets up the contrast.
    • Give at least one concrete example of “lazy dependence” (for instance, using AI to dodge thinking, reading, or drafting altogether).
    • Give at least one concrete example of “deliberate collaboration” (for instance, using AI to brainstorm options, check clarity, or off-load repetitive tasks while you still make the key decisions).
    • End the paragraph with a sentence explaining which of these two modes you think is more common among students right now—and why.

    This paragraph will later function as a “conceptual lens” for your body paragraphs.

    3. Counterargument Paragraph: Ozempification and Black Mirror

    Assignment:
     After watching one of the assigned Black Mirror episodes (“Joan Is Awful,” “Nosedive,” or “Smithereens”), write one counterargument paragraph that challenges the optimistic idea of “strategic de-skilling.”

    • Briefly describe a key moment or character from the episode that illustrates Ozempification—a person becoming more of a “user” of a system than an agent of their own life.
    • Explain how this example suggests that dependence on powerful systems (platforms, algorithms, or AI-like tools) can erode self-agency and critical thinking rather than free us.
    • End by posing a difficult question your eventual essay will need to answer—for example: If it’s so easy to slide from strategic use to dependence, can we really trust ourselves with AI?

    Later, you’ll rebut this paragraph in the full essay, but here your job is to make the counterargument as strong and persuasive as you can.

  • The Case for Strategic De-Skilling: Rethinking Skill and Dependence in the Age of AI (a College Writing Prompt)

    The Case for Strategic De-Skilling: Rethinking Skill and Dependence in the Age of AI (a College Writing Prompt)

    Background

    AI is a tool that we use in business, the arts, and education. Since AI is the genie out of the bottle that isn’t going back in, we have to confront the way AI renders us both benefits and liabilities. One liability is de-skilling, the way we lose our personal initiative, self-reliance and critical thinking skills as our dependence on AI makes us reflexively surrender our own thought for a lazy, frictionless existence in which we assert little effort and let AI do most of the work. 

    However, in his essay “The Age of De-Skilling,” Kwame Anthony Appiah correctly points out that not all de-skilling is equal. Some de-skilling is “corrosive,” some de-skilling is bad but worth it for the benefits, and some de-skilling is so self-destructive that no benefits can redeem its devastation. 

    In this context, where AI becomes interesting is the realm of what we call strategic de-skilling. This is a mindful form of de-skilling in which we take AI shortcuts because such shortcuts give us a worthy outcome that justifies the tradeoffs of whatever we lose as individuals dependent on technology. 

    Your Essay Prompt

    Write a 1,700-word argumentative essay that defends, refutes, or complicates the position that not all dependence on AI is ruinous. Argue that strategic de-skilling—outsourcing repetitive or mechanical labor to machines—can expand our mental bandwidth for higher-order creativity and analysis. Use Appiah’s notion of “bad but worth it” de-skilling to claim that AI, when used deliberately, frees us for deeper work rather than dulls our edge.

    Your Supporting Paragraphs

    For your supporting paragraphs, consider the following mapping components: 

    • cognitive off-loading as optimization
    • human-AI collaboration
    • ethical limits of automation
    • redefinition of skill

    Use Specific Case Studies of Strategic De-Skilling

    I recommend you can pick one or two of the following case studies to anchor your essay in concrete evidence:

    1. AI-Assisted Radiology Diagnostics
    AI models like Google’s DeepMind Health or Lunit INSIGHT CXR pre-screen medical images (X-rays, CT scans, MRIs) for anomalies such as lung nodules or breast tumors, freeing radiologists from exhaustive image scanning and letting them focus on diagnosis, context, and patient communication.

    2. Robotic Surgery Systems (e.g., da Vinci Surgical System)
     Surgeons use robotic interfaces to perform minimally invasive procedures with greater precision and less fatigue. The machine steadies the surgeon’s hand and filters tremors—technically a form of de-skilling—but this trade-off allows focus on strategy, anatomy, and patient safety rather than manual dexterity alone.

    3. AI-Driven Legal Research Platforms (Lexis+, Casetext CoCounsel)
     Lawyers now off-load hours of case searching and citation checking to AI tools that summarize precedent. What they lose in raw research grind, they gain in time for argument strategy and nuanced reasoning—shifting legal skill from memorization to interpretation.

    4. Intelligent Tutoring and Grading Systems (Gradescope, Khanmigo)
     Instructors let AI handle repetitive grading or generate practice problems. The loss of constant paper-marking allows teachers to focus on the art of explanation and individualized mentorship. Students, too, can use these systems to get instant feedback, training them to self-diagnose errors rather than depend entirely on human correction.

    5. AI-Based Drug Discovery (DeepMind’s AlphaFold, Insilico Medicine)
     Pharmaceutical researchers no longer spend years modeling protein folding manually. AI predicts structures in hours, speeding up breakthroughs. Scientists relinquish tedious modeling but redirect their expertise toward hypothesis-driven design, ethics, and clinical translation.

    6. Predictive Maintenance in Aviation and Engineering
     Airline engineers now rely on machine-learning algorithms to flag part failures before they occur. Mechanics perform fewer manual inspections but use data analytics to interpret system reports and prevent disasters—redefining “skill” as foresight rather than reaction.

    7. Algorithmic Financial Trading
     Portfolio managers off-load pattern recognition and timing decisions to AI trading bots. Their role shifts from acting as human calculators to setting ethical boundaries, risk thresholds, and macro-strategic goals—skills grounded in judgment, not just speed.

    8. AI-Powered Architecture and Design (Autodesk Generative Design)
     Architects use generative AI to produce hundreds of design iterations that balance structure, sustainability, and cost. The creative act moves from drafting to curating: selecting and refining the most meaningful human aesthetic from machine-generated abundance.

    9. Autonomous Agriculture Systems (John Deere’s See & Spray)
     Farmers now use AI-guided tractors and drones to detect weeds and optimize fertilizer use. They surrender manual fieldwork but gain ecological precision and data-driven management skills that improve yields and sustainability.

    10. AI-Enhanced Music and Film Editing (Adobe Sensei, AIVA, Runway ML)
     Editors and composers off-load technical tedium—color correction, noise reduction, beat synchronization—to AI tools. This frees them to focus on emotional pacing, thematic rhythm, and creative storytelling—the distinctly human layer of artistry.

    Purpose
    Your goal is to demonstrate nuanced critical thinking about AI’s role in human skill development. Show that you understand the difference between lazy dependence and deliberate collaboration. Engage with Appiah’s complicated notion of de-skilling to explore whether AI’s shortcuts lead to degradation—or, when used wisely, to liberation.

  • The Gospel of De-Skilling: When AI Turns Our Minds into Mashed Potatoes

    The Gospel of De-Skilling: When AI Turns Our Minds into Mashed Potatoes

    Kwame Anthony Appiah, in “The Age of De-Skilling,” poses a question that slices to the bone of our moment: Will artificial intelligence expand our minds or reduce them to obedient, gelatinous blobs? The creeping decay of competence and curiosity—what he calls de-skilling—happens quietly. Every time AI interprets a poem, summarizes a theory, or rewrites a sentence for us, another cognitive muscle atrophies. Soon, we risk becoming well-polished ghosts of our former selves. The younger generation, raised on this digital nectar, may never build those muscles at all. Teachers who lived through both the Before and After Times can already see the difference in their classrooms: the dimming spark, the algorithmic glaze in the eyes.

    Yet Appiah reminds us that all progress extracts a toll. When writing first emerged, the ancients panicked. In Plato’s Phaedrus, King Thamus warned that this new technology—writing—would make people stupid. Once words were carved into papyrus, memory would rot, dialogue would wither, nuance would die. The written word, Thamus feared, would make us forgetful and isolated. And in a way, he was right. Writing didn’t make us dumb, but it did fundamentally rewire how we think, remember, and converse. Civilization gained permanence and lost immediacy in the same stroke.

    Appiah illustrates how innovation often improves our craft while amputating our pride in it. A pulp mill worker once knew by touch and scent when the fibers were just right. Now, computers do it better—but the hands are idle. Bakers once judged bread by smell, color, and instinct; now a touchscreen flashes “done.” Precision rises, but connection fades. The worker becomes an observer of their own obsolescence.

    I see this too in baseball. When the robotic umpire era dawns, we’ll get flawless strike zones and fewer bad calls. But we’ll also lose Earl Weaver kicking dirt, red-faced and screaming at the ump until his cap flew. That fury—the human mess—is baseball’s soul. Perfection may be efficient, but it’s sterile.

    Even my seventy-five-year-old piano tuner feels it. His trade is vanishing. Digital keyboards never go out of tune; they just go out of style. Try telling a lifelong pianist to find transcendence on a plastic keyboard. The tactile romance of the grand piano, the aching resonance of a single struck note—that’s not progress you can simulate.

    I hear the same story in sound. I often tune my Tecsun PL-990 radio to KJAZZ, a station where a real human DJ spins records in real time. I’ve got Spotify, of course, but its playlists feel like wallpaper for the dead. Spotify never surprises me, never speaks between songs. It’s all flow, no friction—and my brain goes numb. KJAZZ keeps me alert because a person, not a program, is behind it.

    The same tension threads through my writing life. I’ve been writing and weight-lifting daily since my teens. Both disciplines demand sweat, repetition, and pain tolerance. Neglect one, and the other suffers. But since I began using AI to edit two years ago, the relationship has become complicated. Some days, AI feels like a creative partner—it pushes me toward stylistic risks, surprise turns of phrase, and new tonal palettes. Other days, it feels like a crutch. I toss half-baked paragraphs into the machine and tell myself, “ChatGPT will fix it.” That’s not writing; that’s delegation disguised as art.

    When I hit that lazy stretch, I know it’s time to step away—take a nap, watch Netflix, play piano—anything but write. Because once the machine starts thinking for me, I can feel my brain fog over.

    And yet, I confess to living a double life. There’s my AI-edited self, the gleaming, chiseled version of me—the writer on literary steroids. Then there’s my secret writer: the primitive, unassisted one who writes in a private notebook, in the flickering light of what feels like a mythic waterfall. No algorithms, no polish—just me and the unfiltered soul that remembers how to speak without prompts. This secret life is my tether to the human side of creation. It gives my writing texture, contradiction, blood. When I’m writing “in the raw,” I almost feel sneaky and subversive and whisper to myself: “ChatGPT must never know about this.” 

    Appiah is right: the genie isn’t going back in the bottle. Every advance carries its shadow. According to Sturgeon’s Law, 90% of everything is crap, and AI will follow that rule religiously. Most users will become lazy, derivative, and hollow. But the remaining 10%—the thinkers, artists, scientists, doctors, and musicians who wield it with intelligence—will produce miracles. They’ll also suffer for it. Because every new tool reshapes the hand that wields it, and every gain carries a ghost of what it replaces.

    Technology changes us. We change it back. And somewhere in that endless feedback loop—between the bucket piano tuner, the dirt-kicking manager, and the writer lost between human and machine—something resembling the soul keeps flickering.

  • Maps, Not Megaphones: Lessons from Harari, Harris, and Kaplan

    Maps, Not Megaphones: Lessons from Harari, Harris, and Kaplan

    Yuval Noah Harari opens 21 Lessons for the 21st Century with a line that feels more prophetic with each passing year: “In a world deluged by irrelevant information, clarity is power.”


    He’s right. Millions of people rush into the digital coliseum to debate humanity’s future, yet 99.9% of them are shouting through a fog of misinformation, moral panic, and algorithmic distortion. Their sense of the world—our world—is scrambled beyond use.

    Unfair? Of course. But as Harari reminds us, history doesn’t deal in fairness. He admits he can’t give us food, shelter, or comfort, but he can, as a historian, offer something rarer: clarity. A small light in the long night.

    That phrase—clarity in the darkness—hit me like a gut punch while listening to one of the most illuminating podcasts I’ve ever encountered: Sam Harris’s Making Sense, episode #440 (October 24, 2025), featuring author and geopolitical thinker Robert D. Kaplan. Their conversation, centered on Kaplan’s terse 200-page book Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis, offered something I hadn’t felt in years: coherence.

    Most days, I feel swept away by the torrent of half-truths and hot takes about the state of the planet. We seem to be living out Yeats’s grim prophecy that “the center cannot hold.” And yet, as Kaplan spoke, the chaos briefly organized itself into a pattern I could recognize.

    Kaplan’s global map is not comforting—but it’s lucid. He traces the roots of instability to climate change stripping water and fertile soil from sub-Saharan Africa, forcing waves of migration toward Europe. Those migrations, he argues, will ignite decades of right-wing populism across the continent—a slow, grinding backlash that may define the century.

    Equally destructive, he warns, is our collapse of media credibility. Print journalism—with its editors, fact-checkers, and professional skepticism—has been displaced by digital media, where “passion replaces analysis.” Emotion has become the currency of attention. Reason, outbid by rage, has left the building.

    Listening to Kaplan for a single hour taught me more about the architecture of global disorder than months of doomscrolling could. His vision is bleak, but it’s ordered. Sobering, but strangely liberating. In a time when everyone is shouting, he simply draws a map.

    And as Harari might say—maps, not megaphones, are what lead us out of the dark.

  • AI—Superpower for Learning or NPC Machine?

    AI—Superpower for Learning or NPC Machine?

    Essay Assignment:

    Background

    Students describe AI as a superpower for speed and convenience that leaves them with glossy, identical prose—clean, correct, and strangely vacant. Many say it “talks a lot without saying much,” flattens tone into AI-speak, and numbs them with sameness. The more they rely on it, the less they think; laziness becomes a habit, creativity atrophies, and personal voice is lost and replaced by AI-speak. Summaries replace books, notes replace listening, and polished drafts replace real inquiry. The result feels dehumanizing: work that reads like it was written by everyone and no one.

    Students also report a degradation in their education. Higher learning has become boring. Speed, making deadlines, and convenience are its key features, and the AI arms race pushes reluctant students to use AI just to keep pace. 

    The temptation to use AI because all the other students are using it rises with fatigue—copy-paste now, promise depth later—and “later” never arrives. Some call this “cognitive debt”: quick wins today, poorer thinking tomorrow. 

    Some students confess that using AI makes them feel like Non Player Characters in a video game. They’re not growing in their education. They have succumbed to apathy and cynicism as far as their education is concerned. 

    Other students admit that AI has stolen their attention and afflicted them with cognitive debt. Cognitive debt is the mental deficit we accumulate when we let technology do too much of our thinking for us. Like financial debt, it begins as a convenience—offloading memory, calculation, navigation, or decision-making to apps and algorithms—but over time it exacts interest in the form of diminished focus, weakened recall, and blunted problem-solving. Cognitive debt describes the gradual outsourcing of core mental functions—attention, critical reasoning, and creativity—to digital systems that promise efficiency but erode self-reliance. The result is a paradox: as our tools grow “smarter,” we grow more dependent on them to compensate for the very skills they dull. In short, cognitive debt is the quiet cost of convenience: each time we let technology think for us, we lose a little of our capacity to think for ourselves. 

    Yet the picture isn’t purely bleak. Several students say AI can be a lifeline: a steady partner for collaborating, brainstorming, organizing, or language support—especially for non-native speakers—when it’s used as a tutor rather than a ghostwriter. 

    When used deliberately rather than passively, AI writing tools can sharpen critical thinking and creativity by acting as intellectual sparring partners. They generate ideas, perspectives, and counterarguments that challenge students to clarify their own reasoning instead of settling for first thoughts. Rather than accepting the AI’s output, discerning writers critique, refine, and reshape AI writing tools—an exercise in metacognition that strengthens their analytical muscles. The process becomes less about outsourcing thought and more about editing thought—transforming AI from a shortcut into a mirror that reflects the quality, logic, and originality of one’s own mind.

    When used correctly, AI jump-starts drafts and levels the playing field; leaned on heavily, it erases voice, short-circuits struggle, and replaces learning with mindless convenience

    Question You Are Addressing in Your Essay

    But can AI be used effectively, or does our interaction with it, like any other product in the attention economy, reveal that it is designed to sink its talons into us and colonize our brains so that we become less like people with self-agency and more like Non Player Characters whose free will has been taken over by the machines? 

    Writing Prompt

    Write a 1,700-word argumentative essay that answers the above question. Be sure to have a counterargument and rebuttal section. Use four credible sources to support your claim. 

    Suggested Outline

    Paragraph 1: Write a 300-word personal reflection about the way you or someone you know uses AI effectively. Show how the person’s engagement with AI resulted in sharper critical thinking and creativity. Give a specific example of the project that revealed this process. 

    Paragraph 2: Write a 300-word personal reflection about the way you or someone you know abuses AI in a way that trades critical thinking with convenience.  How has AI changed the brain and the person’s approach to education? Write a detailed narrative that dramatizes these changes. 

    Paragraph 3: Write a thesis with 4 mapping components that will point to the topics in your supporting paragraphs.  

    Paragraphs 4-7: Your supporting paragraphs.

    Paragraphs 8 and 9: Your counterargument and rebuttal paragraphs.

    Paragraph 10: Your conclusion, a dramatic restatement of your thesis or a reiteration of a striking image you created in your introduction. 

    Your final page: MLA Works Cited with a minimum of 4 sources. 

  • 30 Student Responses to the Question “What Effect Does Using AI Have on Us?”

    30 Student Responses to the Question “What Effect Does Using AI Have on Us?”

    Prompt:

    Begin your essay with a 400-word personal reflection. This can be about your own experience or that of someone you interview. Focus on how using AI writing tools—like ChatGPT—has changed your habits when it comes to thinking, writing, or getting work done.

    From there, explore the deeper implications of relying on this technology. What happens when AI makes everything faster and easier? Does that convenience come at a cost? Reflect on the way AI can lull us into mental passivity—how it tempts us to hand over the hard work of thinking in exchange for quick results.

    Ask yourself: What kind of writing does AI actually produce? What are its strengths? Where does it fall short? And more importantly, what effect does using AI have on us? Does it sharpen our thinking, or make us more dependent? Do we risk becoming less original, less engaged—more like passive consumers of technology than active creators? As this process continues, are we becoming Non-Player Characters instead of humans with self-agency? Explain. 

    Finally, consider the trade-offs. Are we gaining a tool, or giving something up? Are we turning into characters in a Black Mirror episode—so enamored with convenience that we forget what it means to do the work ourselves? Use concrete examples and honest reflection to dig into the tension between human effort and technological assistance.

    Student Responses to Using AI tools for writing and education:

    1. “I am impressed with the speed and convenience but the final product is overly polished and hollow.”
    2. “I am amazed by the speed of production but all the sentences look the same. Honestly, it’s numbing after a while.”
    3. “The writing is frustrating because it talks a lot without saying much.”
    4. “I don’t have to think as much,” “I save time not having to think” and “I get used to this laziness.”
    5.  “AI writes better than I do, but it doesn’t have my unique voice.”
    6. “AI is like a steady writing partner, always there to help me and bounce off ideas, but lately I realize the more I depend on it, the less I challenge myself to think critically.”
    7. “Thanks to AI, I stopped reading books. Now I just get summaries of books. Now I get the information, but I no longer have a deep understanding.”
    8. “AI helps me take notes and organize ideas but it doesn’t help me truly listen, understand someone’s emotions, show empathy, or deal with uncertainty.”
    9. “AI writing is smooth and structured, but people aren’t. Real thought and emotions are messy. That’s where growth happens.”
    10. “When I’m tired, AI tempts me to just copy and paste it, and the more I use it in this manner, the stronger the temptation becomes.”
    11. “AI makes things really easy for me, but then I ask myself, ‘Am I really learning?’”
    12. “What started out as magical now has become woven into the fabric of daily life. Education has become boring.”
    13. “AI is a production superpower the way it inspires and organizes ideas, but I find over time I become more lazy, less creative, and rely on AI way too much.”
    14. “AI degrades the way we write and think. I can tell when something is written in AI-speak, without real human tone, and the whole experience is dehumanizing.”
    15. “I love AI because it saved me. I am not a native English speaker, so I rely on AI to help with my English. It’s like having a reliable tutor always by my side. But over time, I have become lazy and don’t have the same critical thinking I used to have. I see myself turning into an NPC.”
    16. “I have to use AI because the other students are using it. I should have the same advantages they have. But education has become less creative and more boring. It’s all about ease and convenience now.”
    17. “I used to love AI because it made me confident and motivated me to get my assignments in on my time. But over time, I lost my voice. Now everything is written with an AI voice.”
    18. “The more I use AI, the less I think things through on my own. I cut off my own thinking and just ask ChatGPT. It’s fast, but it kills creativity.”
    19. “When faced with a writing assignment and a blank mind, I would start things with ChatGPT, and it got things going. It wasn’t perfect, but I had something to start with, and I found this comforting. But as I got more confident with ChatGPT, I became less and less engaged with the education process. My default became convenience and nothing more.”
    20. “AI writing is so common, we don’t even ask if the writing is real anymore. No one cares. AI has made us all apathetic. We are NPCs in a video game.”
    21. “AI is a great tool because it helps everyone regardless of how much money we have, but it kills creativity and individuality. We’ve lost the pleasure of education. AI has become a mirror of our own superficial existence.”
    22. “When I first discovered AI to do my writing, I felt I had hit the jackpot, but then after taking so many shortcuts, I lost the love for what I was doing.”
    23. “It’s stressful to see a cursor blinking on a blank page, but thanks to AI, I can get something off and running quickly. The problem is that the words are clean and correct, but also generic. There is no depth to human emotion.”
    24. “I’ve been using AI since high school. A lot of its writing is useless. It doesn’t make sense. It’s inaccurate. It’s poorly written. It’s dehumanizing.”
    25. “AI is basically Google on steroids. I used to dread writing, but AI has pushed me to get my work done. The writing is polished but too perfect to be human writing. The biggest danger is that humans become too reliant on it.”
    26. “I barely use AI. It makes school trivial. It’s just another social media disease like TikTok, these streaming platforms that kill our attention spans and turn us into zombies.”
    27. “AI first felt like having the cheat code to get through school. But then I realized it puts us into a cognitive debt. We lose our tenacity and critical thinking.”
    28. “I am a mother and an avid reader, and I absolutely refuse to use AI for any purpose. AI can’t replace real writing, reading, or journaling. AI is a desecration of education and personal growth.”
    29. At first, I used AI to get ideas, but over time I realized I was no longer thinking. I wasn’t struggling to come up with what I really thought or what I really wanted to argue about. AI silenced who I really was.”
    30. “Using AI to do the heavy lifting doesn’t sit right with me, so I programmed my AI to tutor and guide me through studying, rather than using it as a crutch by providing prompts and tools to help me understand assignments.While my experience with AI has shown me its full capabilities, I’ve also learned that too much of it can ruin the entire experience, in this case, the learning experience.”
  • Paul Bunyan Meets the Chainsaw in Freshman Comp

    Paul Bunyan Meets the Chainsaw in Freshman Comp

    During the Fall Semester of 2024, the English Department had one of those “brown bag” sessions—an optional gathering where instructors actually show up because the topic is like a flashing red light on the education highway. This particular crisis-in-the-making? AI. Would writing tools that millions were embracing at exponential speed render our job obsolete? The room was packed with nervous, coffee-chugging professors, myself included, all bracing for a Pandora’s box of AI-fueled dilemmas. They tossed scenario after scenario at us, and the existential angst was palpable.

    First up: What do you do when a foreign language student submits an essay written in their native tongue, then let’s play translator? Is it cheating? Does the term “English Department” even make sense anymore when our Los Angeles campus sounds like a United Nations general assembly? Are we teaching “English,” or are we, more accurately, teaching “the writing process” to people of many languages with AI now tagging along as a co-author?

    Next came the AI Tsunami, a term we all seemed to embrace with a mix of dread and resignation. What do we do when we’ve reached the point that 90% of the essays we receive are peppered with AI speak so robotic it sounds like Siri decided to write a term paper? We were all skeptical about AI detectors—about as reliable as a fortune teller reading tea leaves. I shared my go-to strategy: Instead of accusing a student of cheating (because who has time for that drama?), I simply leave a comment, dripping with professional distaste: “Your essay reeks of AI-generated pablum. I’m giving it a D because I cannot, in good conscience, grade this higher. If you’d like to rewrite it with actual human effort, be my guest.” The room nodded in approval.

    But here’s the thing: The real existential crisis hit when we realized that the hardworking, honest students are busting their butts for B’s, while the tech-savvy slackers are gaming the system, walking away with A’s by running their bland prose through the AI carwash. The room buzzed with a strange mixture of outrage and surrender—because let’s be honest, at least the grammar and spelling errors are nearly extinct.

    Our dean, ever the Zen master in a room full of jittery academics, calmly suggested that maybe—just maybe—we should incorporate personal reflection into our assignments. His idea? By having students spill a bit of their authentic thoughts onto the page, we could then compare those raw musings to their more polished, suspect, possibly ChatGPT-assisted essays. A clever idea. It’s harder to fake authenticity than to parrot a thesis on The Great Gatsby.

    I nodded thoughtfully, though with a rising sense of dread. How exactly was I supposed to integrate “personal reflections” into a syllabus built around the holy trinity of argumentation, counterarguments, and research? I teach composition and critical thinking, not a creative writing seminar for tortured souls. My job isn’t to sift through essays about existential crises or romantic disasters disguised as epiphanies. It’s to teach students how to build a coherent argument and take down a counterpoint without resorting to tired platitudes. Reflection has its place—but preferably somewhere far from my grading pile.

    Still, I had to admit the dean was on to something. If I didn’t get ahead of this, I’d end up buried under an avalanche of soul-searching essays that somehow all lead to a revelation about “balance in life.” I needed time to mull this over, to figure out how personal writing could serve my course objectives without turning it into group therapy on paper.

    But before I could even start strategizing, the Brown Bag session was over. I gathered my notes, bracing myself for the inevitable flood of “personal growth narratives” waiting for me next semester. 

    As I walked out of that meeting, I had a new writing prompt simmering in my head for my students: “Write an argumentative essay exploring how AI platforms like ChatGPT will reshape education. Project how these technologies might be used in the future and consider the ethical lines that AI use blurs. Should we embrace AI as a tool, or do we need hard rules to curb its misuse? Address academic integrity, critical thinking, and whether AI widens or narrows the education gap.”

    When I got home later that day, in a fit of efficiency, I stuffed my car with a mountain of e-waste—ancient laptops, decrepit tablets, and cell phones that could double as paperweights—and headed to the City of Torrance E-Waste Drive. The line of cars stretched for what seemed like miles, all of us dutifully purging our electronic skeletons to make room for the latest AI-compatible toys. As I waited, I tuned into a podcast with Mark Cuban chatting with Bill Maher, and Cuban was adamant: AI will never be regulated because it’s America’s golden goose for global dominance. And there I was, sitting in a snaking line of vehicles, all of us unwitting soldiers in the tech wars, dumping our outdated gadgets like a 21st-century arms race.

    As I edged closer to the dumpster, I imagined ripping open my shirt to reveal a Captain America emblem beneath, fully embracing the ridiculousness of it all. This wasn’t just teaching anymore—it was a revolution. And if I was going to lead it, I’d need to be like Moses descending from Mt. Sinai, armed with the Tablets of AI Laws. Without these laws, I’d be as helpless as a fish flopping on a dry riverbank. To face the coming storm unprepared wasn’t just unwise; it was professional malpractice. My survival depended on it.

    I thought I had outsmarted AI, like some literary Rambo armed with signal phrases, textual analysis, and in-text citations as my guerrilla tactics. ChatGPT couldn’t handle that level of academic sophistication, right? Wrong. One month later, the machine rolled up offering full signal phrase service like some overachieving valet at the Essay Ritz. That defense crumbled faster than a house of cards in a wind tunnel.

    Okay, I thought, I’ll outmaneuver it with source currency. ChatGPT didn’t do recent articles—perfect! I’d make my students cite cutting-edge research. Surely, that would stump the AI. Nope. Faster than you can say “breaking news,” ChatGPT was pulling up the latest articles like a know-it-all librarian with Wi-Fi in their brain.

    Every time I tried to pin it down, the AI just flexed and swelled, like some mutant Hulk fed on electricity and hubris. I was the noble natural bodybuilder, forged by sweat, discipline, and oceans of egg whites. ChatGPT? It was the juiced-up monster, marinated in digital steroids and algorithmic growth hormones. I’d strain to add ten pounds to my academic bench press; ChatGPT would casually slap on 500 and knock out reps while checking its reflection. I was a relic frozen on the dais, oil-slicked and flexing, while the AI steamrolled past me in the race for writing dominance.

    That’s when the obvious landed like a kettlebell on my chest: I wasn’t going to beat ChatGPT. It wasn’t a bug to patch or a fad to outlast—it was an evolutionary leap, a quantum steroid shot to the act of writing itself. So I stopped swinging at it. Instead, I strapped a saddle on the beast and started steering, learning to use its brute force as my tool instead of my rival.

    It reminded me of a childhood cartoon about Paul Bunyan, the original muscle god with an axe the size of a telephone pole. Then came the chainsaw. There was a contest: man versus machine. Paul roared and hacked, but the chainsaw shredded the forest into submission. The crowd went home knowing the age of the axe was dead. Likewise, the sprawling forest of language has a new lumberjack—and I look pathetic trying to keep up, like a guy standing on Hawthorne Boulevard with a toothbrush, vowing to scrub clean every city block from Lawndale to Palos Verdes.

  • Why Ideas Still Matter in a World of Machines

    Why Ideas Still Matter in a World of Machines

    One of my colleagues, an outstanding writing instructor for more than two decades, has mapped out her exit strategy. She earned a counseling master’s degree, recently completed her life coach certification, and told me she no longer believes in the mission of teaching college writing. Assigning prompts to students who submit AI-generated essays feels meaningless to her—and reading these machine-produced pages makes her physically ill.

    Her words jolted me. I have devoted nearly forty years to this vocation, a career sustained by the assumption that teaching the college essay is an essential skill for young people. We have long agreed that students must learn how to shape chaos into coherence, confront questions that matter to the human condition, write with clarity and force, construct persuasive arguments, examine counterpoints, form informed opinions, master formats, cultivate an authorial voice, and develop critical thinking in a world overflowing with fallacies and propaganda. We also teach students to live with “interiority”—to keep journals, build inner lives, and nurture ideas. These practices have been considered indispensable for personal and professional growth.

    But with AI in the picture, many of my colleagues, including the one planning her departure, now feel bitter and defeated. AI has supplanted us. To our students, AI is more than a tool; it is a counselor, therapist, life coach, tutor, content-generator, and editor that sits in their pockets. They have apps through which they converse with their AI “person.” Increasingly, students bond with these “people” more than with their teachers. They trust AI in ways they do not trust professionals, institutions, or the so-called “laptop class.”

    The sense of displacement is compounded by the quality of student work. Essays are now riddled with AI-speak, clichés, hollow uniformity, facile expressions, superficial analysis, misattributed quotations, hallucinated claims, and fabricated facts. And yet, for the professional world, this output will often suffice. Ninety-five percent of the time, AI’s mediocrity will be “good enough” as workplaces adjust to its speed and efficiency. Thus my colleagues suffer a third wound: irrelevance. If AI can produce serviceable writing quickly, bypassing the fundamentals we teach, then we are the dinosaurs of academia.

    On Monday, when I face my freshman composition students for the first time, I will have to address this reality. I will describe how AI—the merciless stochastic parrot—has unsettled instructors by generating uncanny-valley essays, winning the confidence of students, and leaving teachers uncertain about their place.

    Still, I am not entirely pessimistic about my role. Teaching writing has always required many hats, one of which is the salesman’s. I must sell my ideas, my syllabus, my assignments, and above all, the relevance of writing in students’ lives.

    This semester, I am teaching a class composed entirely of athletes, a measure designed to help with retention. On the first day, I will appeal to what they know best: drills. No athlete mistakes drills for performance. They exist to prepare the body and mind for the real contest. Football players run lateral and backward sprints to build stamina and muscle memory. Pianists practice scales and arpeggios to ready themselves for recitals. Writing drills serve the same purpose: they build the foundation beneath the performance.

    My second pitch will be about the human heart. Education does not begin in the brain; it begins when the heart opens. Just as the athlete “with heart” outperforms the one without it, the student who opens the heart to education learns lessons that endure for life.

    I will tell them about my childhood obsession with baseball. At nine, I devoured every Scholastic book on the subject I could order through Independent Elementary. Many of my heroes were African-American players who endured Jim Crow segregation—forced into separate hotels and restaurants, traveling at great risk. I read about legends like Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson, barred from Major League Baseball because of their race. Through their stories, I learned American history not as dates and facts, but through the eyes of men I revered. My heart opened, and I was educated in a way my schoolteachers never managed.

    I will also tell them about my lost years in college. I enrolled under threat of eviction from my mother and warnings that without higher education, I faced a life of poverty. I loathed classrooms, staring at the clock until I could escape to the gym for squats, deadlifts, and bench presses. Yet in an elective fiction class, I discovered Kafka—how he transmuted his nightmarish inner life into stories that illuminated his world. Then Nabokov, whose audacious style made me long to write with the same confidence, more than I ever longed for a luxury car. If I could capture Nabokov’s authority, I thought, I would be like the Tinman receiving his heart. I would be whole.

    These changes did not come from professors, institutions, or—certainly—not AI. They came from within me, from my heart opening to literature. And yet, a sobering realization remains: the spark for me came through reading, and I see little reading today. I am not dogmatic—perhaps today’s students can find their spark in a documentary on Netflix or an essay on their phones. What matters is the opening of the heart.

    I cannot deny my doubts about remaining relevant in the age of AI, but I believe in the enduring power of ideas. Ideas—true or false—shape lives. They can go viral, ignite movements, and alter history.

    That is why my first assignment will focus on the Liver King, a grifter who peddled “ancestral living” to young men desperate for discipline and belonging. Though he was exposed as a fraud, his message resonated because it spoke to a generation’s hunger for structure and meaning. My students will explore both the desperation of these young men and the manipulations of Bro Culture that preyed upon them.

    Ideas matter. They always have. They always will. My class will succeed or fail on the strength of the ideas I put before my students, and I must present them unapologetically—defended with both my brain and my heart.

  • Death by Convenience: The AI Ads That Want to Rot Your Brain

    Death by Convenience: The AI Ads That Want to Rot Your Brain

    In his essay for The New Yorker, “What Do Commercials About A.I. Really Promise?”, Vinson Cunningham zeroes in on the unspoken premise of today’s AI hype: the dream of total disengagement. He poses the unsettling question: “If human workers don’t have to read, write, or even think, it’s unclear what’s left to do.” It’s a fair point. If ads are any indication, the only thing left for us is to stare blankly into our screens like mollusks waiting to be spoon-fed.

    These ads don’t sell a product; they sell a philosophy—one that flatters your laziness. Fix a leaky faucet? Too much trouble. Write a thank-you note? Are you kidding? Plan a meal, change a diaper, troubleshoot your noise-canceling headphones? Outrageous demands for a species that now views thinking as an optional activity. The machines will do it, and we’ll cheerfully slide into amoebic irrelevance.

    What’s most galling is the heroism layered into the pitch: You’re not shirking your responsibilities, you’re delegating. You’re optimizing your workflow. You’re buying back your precious time. You’re a genius. A disruptor. A life-hacking, boundary-pushing modern-day Prometheus who figured out how to get out of reading bedtime stories to your children.

    But Cunningham has a sharper take. The message behind the AI lovefest isn’t just about convenience—it’s about hollowing us out. As he puts it, “The preferred state, it seems, is a zoned-out semi-presence, the worker accounted for in body but absent in spirit.” That’s what the ads are pushing: a blissful vegetative state, where you’re physically upright but intellectually comatose.

    Why read to your kids when an AI avatar can do it in a soothing British accent? Why help them with their homework when a bot can explain algebra, write essays, correct their errors, and manage their grades—while you binge Breaking Bad for the third time? Why have a conversation with their teacher when your chatbot can send a perfectly passive-aggressive email on your behalf?

    This is not the frictionless future we were promised. It’s a slow lobotomy served on a platter of convenience. The ads imply that the life of the mind is outdated. And critical thinking? That’s for chumps with time to kill. Thinking takes bandwidth—something that would be better spent refining your custom coffee order via voice assistant.

    Cunningham sees the bitter punchline: In our rush to outsource everything, we’ve made ourselves obsolete. And the machines, coldly efficient and utterly indifferent, are more than happy to take it from here.

  • Love in the Time of ChatGPT: On Teaching Writing in the Age of Algorithm

    Love in the Time of ChatGPT: On Teaching Writing in the Age of Algorithm

    In his New Yorker piece, “What Happens After A.I. Destroys College Writing?”, Hua Hsu mourns the slow-motion collapse of the take-home essay while grudgingly admitting there may be a chance—however slim—for higher education to reinvent itself before it becomes a museum.

    Hsu interviews two NYU undergrads, Alex and Eugene, who speak with the breezy candor of men who know they’ve already gotten away with it. Alex admits he uses A.I. to edit all his writing, from academic papers to flirty texts. Research? Reasoning? Explanation? No problem. Image generation? Naturally. He uses ChatGPT, Claude, DeepSeek, Gemini—the full polytheistic pantheon of large language models.

    Eugene is no different, and neither are their classmates. A.I. is now the roommate who never pays rent but always does your homework. The justifications come standard: the assignments are boring, the students are overworked, and—let’s face it—they’re more confident with a chatbot whispering sweet logic into their ears.

    Meanwhile, colleges are flailing. A.I. detection software is unreliable, grading is a time bomb, and most instructors don’t have the time, energy, or institutional backing to play academic detective. The truth is, universities were caught flat-footed. The essay, once a personal rite of passage, has become an A.I.-assisted production—sometimes stitched together with all the charm and coherence of a Frankenstein monster assembled in a dorm room at 2 a.m.

    Hsu—who teaches at a small liberal arts college—confesses that he sees the disconnect firsthand. He listens to students in class and then reads essays that sound like they were ghostwritten by Siri with a mild Xanax addiction. And in a twist both sobering and dystopian, students don’t even see this as cheating. To them, using A.I. is simply modern efficiency. “Keeping up with the times.” Not deception—just delegation.

    But A.I. doesn’t stop at homework. It’s styling outfits, dispensing therapy, recommending gadgets. It has insinuated itself into the bloodstream of daily life, quietly managing identity, desire, and emotion. The students aren’t cheating. They’re outsourcing. They’ve handed over the messy bits of being human to an algorithm that never sleeps.

    And so, the question hangs in the air like cigar smoke: Are writing departments quaint relics? Are we the Latin teachers of the 21st century, noble but unnecessary?

    Some professors are adapting. Blue books are making a comeback. Oral exams are back in vogue. Others lean into A.I., treating it like a co-writer instead of a threat. Still others swap out essays for short-form reflections and response journals. But nearly everyone agrees: the era of the generic prompt is over. If your essay question can be answered by ChatGPT, your students already know it—and so does the chatbot.

    Hsu, for his part, doesn’t offer solutions. He leaves us with a shrug.

    But I can’t shrug. I teach college writing. And for me, this isn’t just a job. It’s a love affair. A slow-burning obsession with language, thought, and the human condition. Either you fall in love with reading and writing—or you don’t. And if I can’t help students fall in love with this messy, incandescent process of making sense of the world through words, then maybe I should hang it up, binge-watch Love Is Blind, and polish my résumé.

    Because this isn’t about grammar. This is about soul. And I’m in the love business.