Cinemorphosis

Tag: artificial-intelligence

  • Beware of the ChatGPT Strut

    Beware of the ChatGPT Strut

    Yesterday my critical thinking students and I talked about the ways we could revise our original content with ChatGPT give it instructions and train this AI tool to go beyond its bland, surface-level writing style. I showed my students specific prompts that would train it to write in a persona:

    “Rewrite the passage with acid wit.”

    “Rewrite the passage with lucid, assured prose.”

    “Rewrite the passage with mild academic language.”

    “Rewrite the passage with overdone academic language.”

    I showed the students my original paragraphs and ChatGPT’s versions of my sample arguments agreeing and disagreeing with Gustavo Arellano’s defense of cultural appropriation, and I said in the ChatGPT rewrites of my original there were linguistic constructions that were more witty, dramatic, stunning, and creative than I could do, and that to post these passages as my own would make me look good, but they wouldn’t be me. I would be misrepresenting myself, even though most of the world will be enhancing their writing like this in the near future. 

    I compared writing without ChatGPT to being a natural bodybuilder. Your muscles may not be as massive and dramatic as the guy on PEDS, but what you see is what you get. You’re the real you. In contrast, when you write with ChatGPT, you are a bodybuilder on PEDS. Your muscle-flex is eye-popping. You start doing the ChatGPT strut. 

    I gave this warning to the class: If you use ChatGPT a lot, as I have in the last year as I’m trying to figure out how I’m supposed to use it in my teaching, you can develop writer’s dysmorphia, the sense that your natural, non-ChatGPT writing is inadequate compared to the razzle-dazzle of ChatGPT’s steroid-like prose. 

    One student at this point disagreed with my awe of ChatGPT and my relatively low opinion of my own “natural” writing. She said, “Your original is better than the ChatGPT versions. Yours makes more sense to me, isn’t so hidden behind all the stylistic fluff, and contains an important sentence that ChatGPT omitted.”

    I looked at the original, and I realized she was right. My prose wasn’t as fancy as ChatGPT’s but the passage about Gustavo Arellano’s essay defending cultural appropriation was more clear than the AI versions.

    At this point, I shifted metaphors in describing ChatGPT. Whereas I began the class by saying that AI revisions are like giving steroids to a bodybuilder with body dysmorphia, now I was warning that ChatGPT can be like an abusive boyfriend or girlfriend. It wants to hijack our brains because the main objective of any technology is to dominate our lives. In the case of ChatGPT, this domination is sycophantic: It gives us false flattery, insinuates itself into our lives, and gradually suffocates us. 

    As an example, I told the students that I was getting burned out using ChatGPT, and I was excited to write non-ChatGPT posts on my blog, and to live in a space where my mind could breathe the fresh air apart from ChatGPT’s presence. 

    I wanted to see how ChatGPT would react to my plan to write non-ChatGPT posts, and ChatGPT seemed to get scared. It started giving me all of these suggestions to help me implement my non-ChatGPT plan. I said back to ChatGPT, “I can’t use your suggestions or plans or anything because the whole point is to live in the non-ChatGPT Zone.” I then closed my ChatGPT tab. 

    I concluded by telling my students that we need to reach a point where ChatGPT is a tool like Windows and Google Docs, but as soon as we become addicted to it, it’s an abusive platform. At that point, we need to use some self-agency and distance ourselves from it.  

  • If Used Wisely, AI Can Push Your Writing to Greater Heights, But It Can Also Create Writer’s Dysmorphia

    If Used Wisely, AI Can Push Your Writing to Greater Heights, But It Can Also Create Writer’s Dysmorphia

    No ChatGPT or AI of any kind was used in the following:

    For close to 2 years, I’ve been editing and collaborating with ChatGPT for my personal and professional writing. I teach my college writing students how to engage with it, giving it instructions to avoid its default setting for bland, anodyne prose and teaching it how to adopt various writing personas. 

    For my own writing, ChatGPT has boosted my prose and imagery, making my writing more stunning, dramatic, and vivid.

    Because I have been a bodybuilder since 1974, I will use a bodybuilding analogy: Writing with ChatGPT is like bodybuilding with PEDS. I get addicted to the boost, the extra pump, and the extra muscle. Just as a bodybuilder can get body dysmorphia, ChatGPT can give writers a sort of writer’s dysmorphia. 

    But posting a few articles on Reddit recently in which a few readers were put off by what they saw as “fake writing,” I stopped in my tracks to question my use of ChatGPT. Part of me thinks that the hunger for authenticity is such that I should be writing content that is more like the natural bodybuilder, the guy who ventures forth in his endeavor with no PEDS. What you see is what you get, all human, no steroids, no AI.

    While I like the way ChatGPT pushes me in new directions that I would not explore on my own and makes the writing process engaging in new ways, I acknowledge that AI-fueled writer’s dysmorphia is real. We can get addicted to the juiced-up prose and the razzle-dazzle.

    Secondly, we can outsource too much thinking to AI and get lazy rather than do the work ourselves. In the process, our critical thinking skills begin to atrophy.

    Third, I think we can fill our heads with too much ChatGPT and live inside a hazy AI fever swamp. I recall going to middle school and on the outskirts of the campus, you could see the “burn-outs,” pot-addicted kids staring into the distance with their lizard eyes. One afternoon a friend joked, “They’re high so often, not being high must be a trip for them.” What if we become like these lizard-eyed burnouts and wander this world on a constant ChatGPT high that is so debilitating that we need to sober up in the natural world upon which we find the non-AI existence is its own form of healthy pleasure? In other words, we should be careful not to let ChatGPT live rent-free in our brains.

    Finally, people hunger for authentic, all-human writing, so moving forward on this blog, I want to continue to push myself with some ChatGPT-edited writing, but I also want to present all-natural, all-human writing, as is the case with this post. 

  • The ChatGPT-Book: My Dream Machine in a World of Wearable Nonsense

    The ChatGPT-Book: My Dream Machine in a World of Wearable Nonsense

    I loathe smartphones. They’re tiny, slippery surveillance rectangles masquerading as tools of liberation. Typing on one feels like threading a needle while wearing oven mitts. My fingers bungle every attempt at precision, the autocorrect becomes a co-author I never hired, and the screen is so small I have to squint like I’m decoding Morse code through a peephole. Tablets aren’t much better—just larger slabs of compromise.

    Give me a mechanical keyboard, a desktop tower that hums with purpose, and twin 27-inch monitors beaming side by side like architectural blueprints of clarity. That’s how I commune with ChatGPT. I need real estate. I want to see the thinking unfold, not peer at it like a medieval monk examining a parchment shard.

    So when one of my students whipped out her phone, opened the ChatGPT app, and began speaking to it like it was her digital therapist, I nodded politely. But inside, I was muttering, “Not for me.” I’ve lived long enough to know that I don’t acclimate well to anything that fits in a jeans pocket.

    That’s why Matteo Wong’s article, “OpenAI’s Ambitions Just Became Crystal Clear,” caught my eye. Apparently, Sam Altman has teamed up with Jony Ive—the high priest of sleekness and the ghost behind Apple’s glory days—to sink $5 billion into building a “family of devices” for ChatGPT. Presumably, these will be as smooth, sexy, and addictive as the iPhone once was before it became a dopamine drip and digital leash.

    Honestly? It makes sense. In the last year, my ChatGPT use has skyrocketed, while my interaction with other platforms has withered. I now use it to write, research, plan, edit, make weight-management meal plans, and occasionally psychoanalyze myself. If there were a single device designed to serve as a “mother hub”—a central console for creativity, productivity, and digital errands—I’d buy it. But not if it’s shaped like a lapel pin. Not if it whispers in my ear like some clingy AI sprite. I don’t want a neural appendage or a mind tickler. I want a screen.

    What I’m hoping for is a ChatGPT-Book: something like a Chromebook, but with real writing DNA. A device with its own operating system that consolidates browser tabs, writing apps, and research tools. A no-nonsense, 14-inch-and-up display where I can visualize my creative process, not swipe through it.

    We all learn and create differently in this carnival of overstimulation we call the Information Age. I imagine Altman and Ive know that—and will deliver a suite of devices for different brains and temperaments. Mine just happens to want clarity, not minimalism masquerading as genius.

    Wong’s piece doesn’t surprise or shock me. It’s just the same old Silicon Valley gospel: dominate or be buried. Apple ate BlackBerry. Facebook devoured MySpace. And MySpace? It’s now a dusty relic in the basement of internet history—huddled next to beta tapes, 8-tracks, and other nostalgia-laced tech corpses.

    If ChatGPT gets its own device and redefines how we interact with the web, well… chalk it up to evolution. But for the love of all that’s analog—give me a keyboard, a screen, and some elbow room.

  • The Coldplay Apocalypse: Notes from a Smoothie-Drinking Future

    The Coldplay Apocalypse: Notes from a Smoothie-Drinking Future

    Welcome to the future—where the algorithm reigns, identity is a curated filter pack, and dystopia arrives not with a boot to the face but a wellness app and a matching pair of $900 headphones that murmur Coldplay into your skull at just the right serotonin-laced frequency.

    We will all look like vaguely reprocessed versions of Salma Hayek or Brad Pitt—digitally airbrushed to remove all imperfections but retain just enough “authenticity” to keep our neuroses in play. Our playlists will be algorithmically optimized to sound like Coldplay mated with spa music and decided never to take risks again.

    We’ll wear identical headphones—sleek, matte, noise-canceling monuments to our collective disinterest in one another. Not to be rude. Just too evolved to engage. Every journal entry we write will be AI-assisted, reading like the bastard child of Brené Brown and ChatGPT: reflective, sincere, and soul-crushingly uniform.

    Our influencers? They’ll all look the same too—gender-fluid, lightly medicated, with just enough charisma to sell you an oat milk subscription while quoting Kierkegaard. Politics, entertainment, mental health, and skincare will be served up on the same TikTok platter, narrated by someone who once dated a crypto founder and now podcasts about trauma.

    Three times a day, we’ll sip our civilization smoothie: a beige sludge of cricket protein, creatine, nootropic fibers, and a lightly psychoactive GLP-1 variant that keeps hunger, sadness, and ambition at bay. It’s not a meal; it’s a contract with the status quo. We’ll all wear identical sweat-wicking athleisure in soothing desert neutrals, paired with orthopedic sneakers in punchy tech-startup orange.

    We’ll all “take breaks from social media” at the same approved hour—between 5 and 6 p.m.—so we can “reconnect with the analog world” by staring at a sunset long enough to photograph it and post our profound revelations online at 6:01.

    Nobody will want children, because who wants to drag a baby into a climate-controlled apartment where the rent is half your nervous system? Marriage? A relic of a time when humans still believed in eye contact. Romances will be managed by chatbots programmed to simulate caring without requiring reciprocation. You’ll tell the app your love language, it’ll write your messages, and your partner’s app will do the same. Everyone’s emotionally satisfied, no one’s truly known.

    And vacations? Pure fiction. Deepfakes will show us in Bali, Tuscany, or the moon—beaming with digital joy, sipping pixelated espresso. Real travel is for the ultra-rich and the deluded.

    As for existential despair? Doesn’t exist anymore. Our moods will be finely tuned by micro-dosed pharmacology and AI-generated affirmations. No more late-night crises or 3 a.m. sobbing into a pillow. Just an endless, gentle hum of stabilized contentment—forever.

  • 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.