Tag: chatgpt

Two Student Learning Outcomes to Encourage Responsible Use of AI Tools in College Writing Classes
As students increasingly rely on AI writing tools—sometimes even using one tool to generate an assignment and another to rewrite or “launder” it—we must adapt our teaching strategies to stay aligned with these evolving practices. To address this shift, I propose the following two updated Student Learning Outcomes that reflect the current landscape of AI-assisted writing:

Student Learning Outcome #1: Using AI Tools Responsibly

Students will integrate AI tools into their writing assignments in ways that enhance learning, demonstrate critical thinking, and reflect ethical and responsible use of technology.

Definition of “Meaningfully, Ethically, and Responsibly”:

To use AI tools meaningfully, ethically, and responsibly means students treat AI not as a shortcut to bypass thinking, but as a collaborative aid to deepen their writing, research, and revision process. Ethical use includes acknowledging when and how AI was used, avoiding plagiarism or misrepresentation, and understanding the limits and biases of these tools. Responsible use involves aligning AI usage with the assignment’s goals, maintaining academic integrity, and using AI to support—not replace—original thought and student voice.

Five Assignment Strategies to Fulfill This Learning Outcome:
1. AI Process Reflection Logs
  Require students to submit a short reflection with each assignment explaining if, how, and why they used AI tools (e.g., brainstorming, outlining, revising), and evaluate the effectiveness and ethics of their choices.
2. Compare-and-Critique Tasks
  Assign students to generate an AI-written response to a prompt and then critique it—identifying weaknesses in reasoning, tone, or factual accuracy—and revise it with their own voice and insights.
3. Source Verification Exercises
  Ask students to use AI to gather preliminary research, then verify, fact-check, and cite real sources that support or challenge the AI’s output, teaching them discernment and digital literacy.
4. AI vs. Human Draft Workshops
  Have students bring both an AI-generated draft and a human-written draft of the same paragraph to class. In peer review, students analyze the differences in tone, structure, and depth of thought to develop judgment about when AI helps or hinders.
5. Statement of Integrity Clause
  Include a required statement in the assignment where students attest to their use of AI tools, much like a bibliography or code of ethics, fostering transparency and self-awareness.
Student Learning Outcome #2: Avoiding the Uncanny Valley Effect

Students will produce writing that sounds natural, human, and authentic—free from the awkwardness, artificiality, or emotional flatness often associated with AI-generated content.

Definition: The Uncanny Valley Effect in Writing

The Uncanny Valley Effect in writing occurs when a piece of text almost sounds human—but not quite. It may be grammatically correct and well-structured, yet it feels emotionally hollow, overly generic, oddly formal, or just slightly “off.” Like a robot trying to pass as a person, the writing stirs discomfort or distrust because it mimics human tone without the depth, insight, or nuance of actual lived experience or authorial voice.

5 Common Characteristics of the Uncanny Valley in Student Writing:
1. Generic Language – Vague, overused phrases that sound like filler rather than specific, engaged thought (e.g., “Since the dawn of time…”).
2. Overly Formal Tone – A stiff, robotic voice with little rhythm, personality, or variation in sentence structure.
3. Surface-Level Thinking – Repetition of obvious or uncritical ideas with no deeper analysis, curiosity, or counterargument.
4. Emotional Emptiness – Statements that lack genuine feeling, perspective, or a sense of human urgency.
5. Odd Phrasing or Word Choice – Slightly off metaphors, synonyms, or transitions that feel misused or unnatural to a fluent reader.
7 Ways Students Can Use AI Tools Without Falling into the Uncanny Valley:
1. Always Revise the Output – Use AI-generated text as a rough draft or idea starter, but revise it with your own voice, style, and specific insights.
2. Inject Lived Experience – Add personal examples, concrete details, or specific observations that an AI cannot generate from its data pool.
3. Break the Pattern – Vary your sentence length, tone, and rhythm to avoid the AI’s predictable, formal cadence.
4. Cut the Clichés – Watch for stale or filler phrases (“in today’s society,” “this essay will discuss…”) and replace them with clearer, more original statements.
5. Ask the AI Better Questions – Use prompts that require nuance, comparison, or contradiction rather than shallow definitions or summaries.
6. Fact-Check and Source – Don’t trust AI-generated facts or references. Verify claims with real sources and cite them properly.
7. Read Aloud – If it sounds awkward or lifeless when spoken, revise. Authentic writing should sound like something a thoughtful person might actually say.
May 12, 2025
AI Wants to be Your Friend, and It’s Shrinking Your Mind

In The Atlantic essay “AI Is Not Your Friend,” Mike Caulfield 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.

May 10, 2025
You, Rewritten: Algorithmic Capture in the Age of AI

Once upon a time, writing instructors worried about comma splices and uninspired thesis statements. Now, we’re dodging 5,000-word essays spat out by AI platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude—essays so eerily competent they hit every benchmark on the department rubric: in-text citations, signal phrases, MLA formatting, and close readings with all the soulful depth of a fax machine reading T.S. Eliot. This is prose caught in the Uncanny Valley—syntactically flawless, yet emotionally barren, like a Stepford Wife enrolled in English 101. And since these algorithmic Franken-scripts often evade plagiarism detectors, we’re all left asking the same 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 deeper I sank into student conversations, the clearer it became: this isn’t just about writing. It’s about living. My students aren’t merely outsourcing thesis statements. They’re using AI to rewrite awkward apology texts, craft flirtatious replies on dating apps, conduct self-guided therapy with bots named “Charles” and “Luna,” and decode garbled lectures delivered by tenured mumblers. They feed syllabi into GPT to generate study guides. They get toothpaste recommendations. They draft business emails and log them in AI-curated archives. In short: ChatGPT isn’t a tool. It’s a prosthetic consciousness.

And here’s the punchline: they see no alternative. AI isn’t a novelty; it’s a survival mechanism. In their hyper-accelerated, ultra-competitive, attention-fractured lives, AI has become as essential as caffeine and Wi-Fi. So no, I won’t be asking students to merely critique ChatGPT as a glorified spell-checker. That’s quaint. Instead, I’m introducing them to Algorithmic Capture—the quiet tyranny by which human behavior is shaped, scripted, and ultimately absorbed by optimization-driven systems. Under this logic, ambiguity is penalized, nuance is flattened, and people begin tailoring themselves to perform for the algorithmic eye. They don’t just use the machine. They become legible to it.

For this reason, the new essay assignment doesn’t ask, “What’s the future of writing?” It asks something far more urgent: What’s happening to you? I’m having students analyze the eerily prophetic episodes of Black Mirror—especially “Joan Is Awful,” that fluorescent satire of algorithmic self-annihilation—and write about how Algorithmic Capture is reshaping their lives, identities, and choices. They won’t just be critiquing AI’s effect on prose. They’ll be interrogating the way it quietly rewrites the self.

May 4, 2025
The Haunted Mind vs. the Predictive Engine: Why AI Writing Rings Hollow

In More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI, John Warner points out just how emotionally tone-deaf ChatGPT is when tasked with describing something as tantalizing as a cinnamon roll. At best, the AI produces a sterile list of adjectives like “delicious,” “fattening,” and “comforting.” For a human who has gluttonous memories, however, the scent of cinnamon rolls sets off a chain reaction of sensory and emotional triggers—suddenly, you’re transported into a heavenly world of warm, gooey indulgence. For Warner, the smell launches him straight into vivid memories of losing his willpower at a Cinnabon in O’Hare Airport. ChatGPT, by contrast, is utterly incapable of such sensory delirium. It has no desire, no memory, no inner turmoil. As Warner explains, “ChatGPT has no capacity for sense memory; it has no memory in the way human memory works, period.”

Without memory, ChatGPT can’t make meaningful connections and associations. The cinnamon roll for John Warner is a marker for a very particular time and place in his life. He was in a state of mind then that made him a different person than he was twelve years later reminiscing about the days of caving in to the temptation to buy a Cinnabon. For him, the cinnamon roll has layers and layers of associations that inform his writing about the cinnamon roll that gives depth to his description of that dessert that ChatGPT cannot match.

Imagine ChatGPT writing a vivid description of Farrell’s Ice Cream Parlour. It would perform a serviceable job describing the physical layout–the sweet aroma of fresh waffle cones, sizzling burgers, and syrupy fudge; the red-and-white striped wallpaper stretched from corner to corner, the dark, polished wooden booths lining the walls; the waitstaff, dressed in candy-cane-striped vests and straw boater hats, and so on. However, there are vital components missing in the description–a kid’s imagination full of memories and references to their favorite movies, TV shows, and books. The ChatGPT version is also lacking in a kid’s perspective, which is full of grandiose aspirations to being like their heroes and mythical legends.

For someone who grow up believing that Farrell’s was the Holy Grail for birthday parties, my memory of the place adds multiple dimensions to the ice cream parlour that ChatGPT is incapable of rendering:

When I was a kid growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1970s, there was an ice creamery called Farrell’s. In a child’s imagination, Farrell’s was the equivalent of Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. You didn’t go to Farrell’s often, maybe once every two years or so. Entering Farrell’s, you were greeted by the cacophony of laughter and the clinking of spoons against glass. Servers in candy-striped uniforms dashed around with the energy of marathon runners, bearing trays laden with gargantuan sundaes. You sat down, your eyes wide with awe, and the menu was presented to you like a sacred scroll. You don’t need to read it, though. Your quest was clear: the legendary banana split. When the dessert finally arrived, it was nothing short of a spectacle. The banana split was monumental, an ice cream behemoth. It was as if the dessert gods themselves had conspired to create this masterpiece. Three scoops of ice cream, draped in velvety hot fudge and caramel, crowned with mountains of whipped cream and adorned with maraschino cherries, all nestled between perfectly ripe bananas. Sprinkles and nuts cascaded down the sides like the treasures of a sugar-coated El Dorado. As you took your first bite, you embarked on a journey as grand and transformative as any hero’s quest. The flavors exploded in your mouth, each spoonful a step deeper into the enchanted forest of dessert ecstasy. You were not just eating ice cream; you were battling dragons of indulgence and conquering kingdoms of sweetness. The sheer magnitude of the banana split demanded your full attention and stamina. Your small arms wielded the spoon like a warrior’s sword, and with each bite, you felt a mixture of triumph and fatigue. By the time you reached the bottom of the bowl, you were exhausted. Your muscles ached as if you’d climbed a mountain, and you were certain that you’d expanded your stomach capacity to Herculean proportions. You briefly considered the possibility of needing an appendectomy. But oh, the glory of it all! Your Farrell’s sojourn was worth every ache and groan. You entered the ice creamery as an ordinary child and emerged as a hero. In this fairy-tale-like journey, you had undergone a metamorphosis. You were no longer just a scrawny kid from the Bay Area; you were now a muscle-bound strutting Viking of the dessert world, having mastered the art of indulgence and delight. As you returned home, the experience of Farrell’s left a lasting imprint on your soul. You regaled your friends with tales of your conquest, the banana split becoming a legendary feast in the annals of your childhood adventures. In your heart, you knew that this epic journey to Farrell’s, this magical pilgrimage, had elevated you to the ranks of dessert royalty, a memory that would forever glitter like a golden crown in the kingdom of your mind. As a child, even an innocent trip to an ice creamery was a transformational experience. You entered Farrell’s a helpless runt; you exited it a glorious Viking.

The other failure of ChatGPT is that it cannot generate meaningful narratives. Without memory or point of view, ChatGPT has no stories to tell and no lessons to impart. Since the days of our Paleolithic ancestors, humans have shared emotionally charged stories around the campfire to ward off both external dangers—like saber-toothed tigers—and internal demons—obsessions, pride, and unbridled desires that can lead to madness. These tales resonate because they acknowledge a truth that thoughtful people, religious or not, can agree on: we are flawed and prone to self-destruction. It’s this precarious condition that makes storytelling essential. Stories filled with struggle, regret, and redemption offer us more than entertainment; they arm us with the tools to stay grounded and resist our darker impulses. ChatGPT, devoid of human frailty, cannot offer us such wisdom.

Because ChatGPT has no memory, it cannot give us the stories and life lessons we crave and have craved for thousands of years in the form of folk tales, religious screeds, philosophical treatises, and personal manifestos.

That ChatGPT can only muster a Wikipedia-like description of a cinnamon roll hardly makes it competitive with humans when it comes to the kind of writing we crave with all of our heart, mind, and soul.

One of ChatGPT’s greatest disadvantages is that, unlike us, it is not a fallen creature slogging through the freak show that is this world, to use the language of George Carlin. Nor does ChatGPT understand how our fallen condition can put us at the mercy of our own internal demons and obsessions that cause us to warp reality that leads to dysfunction. In other words, ChatGPT does not have a haunted mind and without any oppressive memories, it cannot impart stories of value to us.

When I think of being haunted, I think of one emotion above all others–regret. Regret doesn’t just trap people in the past—it embalms them in it, like a fly in amber, forever twitching with regret. Case in point: there are three men I know who, decades later, are still gnashing their teeth over a squandered romantic encounter so catastrophic in their minds, it may as well be their personal Waterloo.

It was the summer of their senior year, a time when testosterone and bad decisions flowed freely. Driving from Bakersfield to Los Angeles for a Dodgers game, they were winding through the Grapevine when fate, wearing a tie-dye bikini, waved them down. On the side of the road, an overheated vintage Volkswagen van—a sunbaked shade of decayed orange—coughed its last breath. Standing next to it? Four radiant, sun-kissed Grateful Dead followers, fresh from a concert and still floating on a psychedelic afterglow.

These weren’t just women. These were ethereal, free-spirited nymphs, perfumed in the intoxicating mix of patchouli, wild musk, and possibility. Their laughter tinkled like wind chimes in an ocean breeze, their sun-bronzed shoulders glistening as they waved their bikinis and spaghetti-strap tops in the air like celestial signals guiding sailors to shore.

My friends, handy with an engine but fatally clueless in the ways of the universe, leaped to action. With grease-stained heroism, they nursed the van back to health, coaxing it into a purring submission. Their reward? An invitation to abandon their pedestrian baseball game and join the Deadhead goddesses at the Santa Barbara Summer Solstice Festival—an offer so dripping with hedonistic promise that even a monk would’ve paused to consider.

But my friends? Naïve. Stupid. Shackled to their Dodgers tickets as if they were golden keys to Valhalla. With profuse thanks (and, one imagines, the self-awareness of a plank of wood), they declined. They drove off, leaving behind the road-worn sirens who, even now, are probably still dancing barefoot somewhere, oblivious to the tragedy they unwittingly inflicted.

Decades later, my friends can’t recall a single play from that Dodgers game, but they can describe—down to the last bead of sweat—the precise moment they drove away from paradise. Bring it up, and they revert into snarling, feral beasts, snapping at each other over whose fault it was that they abandoned the best opportunity of their pathetic young lives. Their girlfriends, beautiful and present, might as well be holograms. After all, these men are still spiritually chained to that sun-scorched highway, watching the tie-dye bikini tops flutter in the wind like banners of a lost kingdom.

Insomnia haunts them. Their nights are riddled with fever dreams of sun-drenched bacchanals that never happened. They wake in cold sweats, whispering the names of women they never actually kissed. Their relationships suffer, their souls remain malnourished, and all because, on that fateful day, they chose baseball over Dionysian bliss.

Regret couldn’t have orchestrated a better long-term psychological prison if it tried. It’s been forty years, but they still can’t forgive themselves. They never will. And in their minds, somewhere on that dusty stretch of highway, a rusted-out orange van still sits, idling in the sun, filled with the ghosts of what could have been.

Humans have always craved stories of folly, and for good reason. First, there’s the guilty pleasure of witnessing someone else’s spectacular downfall—our inner schadenfreude finds comfort in knowing it wasn’t us who tumbled into the abyss of human madness. Second, these stories hold up a mirror to our own vulnerability, reminding us that we’re all just one bad decision away from disaster.

As a teacher, I can tell you that if you don’t anchor your ideas to a compelling story, you might as well be lecturing to statues. Without a narrative hook, students’ eyes glaze over, their minds drift, and you’re left questioning every career choice that led you to this moment. But if you offer stories brimming with flawed characters—haunted by regrets so deep they’re like Lot’s wife, frozen and unmovable in their failure—students perk up. These narratives speak to something profoundly human: the agony of being broken and the relentless desire to become whole again. That’s precisely where AI like ChatGPT falls short. It may craft mechanically perfect prose, but it has never known the sting of regret or the crushing weight of shame. Without that depth, it can’t deliver the kind of storytelling that truly resonates.

May 2, 2025
The Last Writing Instructor: Holding the Line in a Post-Thinking World

Last night, I was trapped in a surreal nightmare—a bureaucratic limbo masquerading as a college elective. The course had no purpose other than to grant students enough credits to graduate. No curriculum, no topics, no teaching—just endless hours of supervised inertia. My role? Clock in, clock out, and do absolutely nothing.

The students were oddly cheerful, like campers at some low-budget retreat. They brought packed lunches, sprawled across desks, and killed time with card games and checkers. They socialized, laughed, and blissfully ignored the fact that this whole charade was a colossal waste of time. Meanwhile, I sat there, twitching with existential dread. The urge to teach something—anything—gnawed at my gut. But that was forbidden. I was there to babysit, not educate.

The shame hung on me like wet clothes. I felt obsolete, like a relic from the days when education had meaning. The minutes dragged by like a DMV line, each one stretching into a slow, agonizing eternity. I wondered if this Kafkaesque hell was a punishment for still believing that teaching is more than glorified daycare.

This dream echoes a fear many writing instructors share: irrelevance. Daniel Herman explores this anxiety in his essay, “The End of High-School English.” He laments how students have always found shortcuts to learning—CliffsNotes, YouTube summaries—but still had to confront the terror of a blank page. Now, with AI tools like ChatGPT, that gatekeeping moment is gone. Writing is no longer a “metric for intelligence” or a teachable skill, Herman claims.

I agree to an extent. Yes, AI can generate competent writing faster than a student pulling an all-nighter. But let’s not pretend this is new. Even in pre-ChatGPT days, students outsourced essays to parents, tutors, and paid services. We were always grappling with academic honesty. What’s different now is the scale of disruption.

Herman’s deeper question—just how necessary are writing instructors in the age of AI—is far more troubling. Can ChatGPT really replace us? Maybe it can teach grammar and structure well enough for mundane tasks. But writing instructors have a higher purpose: teaching students to recognize the difference between surface-level mediocrity and powerful, persuasive writing.

Herman himself admits that ChatGPT produces essays that are “adequate” but superficial. Sure, it can churn out syntactically flawless drivel, but syntax isn’t everything. Writing that leaves a lasting impression—“Higher Writing”—is built on sharp thought, strong argumentation, and a dynamic authorial voice. Think Baldwin, Didion, or Nabokov. That’s the standard. I’d argue it’s our job to steer students away from lifeless, task-oriented prose and toward writing that resonates.

Herman’s pessimism about students’ indifference to rhetorical nuance and literary flair is half-baked at best. Sure, dive too deep into the murky waters of Shakespearean arcana or Melville’s endless tangents, and you’ll bore them stiff—faster than an unpaid intern at a three-hour faculty meeting. But let’s get real. You didn’t go into teaching to serve as a human snooze button. You went into sales, whether you like it or not. And what are you selling? Persona, ideas, and the antidote to chaos.

First up: persona. It’s not just about writing—it’s about becoming. How do you craft an identity, project it with swagger, and use it to navigate life’s messiness? When students read Oscar Wilde, Frederick Douglass, or Octavia Butler, they don’t just see words on a page—they see mastery. A fully-realized persona commands attention with wit, irony, and rhetorical flair. Wilde nailed it when he said, “The first task in life is to assume a pose.” He wasn’t joking. That pose—your persona—grows stronger through mastery of language and argumentation. Once students catch a glimpse of that, they want it. They crave the power to command a room, not just survive it. And let’s be clear—ChatGPT isn’t in the persona business. That’s your turf.

Next: ideas. You became a teacher because you believe in the transformative power of ideas. Great ideas don’t just fill word counts; they ignite brains and reshape worldviews. Over the years, students have thanked me for introducing them to concepts that stuck with them like intellectual tattoos. Take Bread and Circus—the idea that a tiny elite has always controlled the masses through cheap food and mindless entertainment. Students eat that up (pun intended). Or nihilism—the grim doctrine that nothing matters and we’re all here just killing time before we die. They’ll argue over that for hours. And Rousseau’s “noble savage” versus the myth of human hubris? They’ll debate whether we’re pure souls corrupted by society or doomed from birth by faulty wiring like it’s the Super Bowl of philosophy.

ChatGPT doesn’t sell ideas. It regurgitates language like a well-trained parrot, but without the fire of intellectual curiosity. You, on the other hand, are in the idea business. If you’re not selling your students on the thrill of big ideas, you’re failing at your job.

Finally: chaos. Most people live in a swirling mess of dysfunction and anxiety. You sell your students the tools to push back: discipline, routine, and what Cal Newport calls “deep work.” Writers like Newport, Oliver Burkeman, Phil Stutz, and Angela Duckworth offer blueprints for repelling chaos and replacing it with order. ChatGPT can’t teach students to prioritize, strategize, or persevere. That’s your domain.

So keep honing your pitch. You’re selling something AI can’t: a powerful persona, the transformative power of ideas, and the tools to carve order from the chaos. ChatGPT can crunch words all it wants, but when it comes to shaping human beings, it’s just another cog. You? You’re the architect.

Right?

Maybe.

Let’s not get too comfortable in our intellectual trench coats. While we pride ourselves on persona, big ideas, and resisting chaos, we’re up against something far more insidious than plagiarism. AI isn’t just outsourcing thought—it’s rewiring brains. In the Black Mirror episode “Joan Is Awful,” we watch a woman’s life turned into a deepfake soap opera, customized for mass consumption, with every gesture, flaw, and confession algorithmically mined and exaggerated. What’s most horrifying isn’t the surveillance or the celebrity—it’s the flattening. Joan becomes a caricature of herself, optimized for engagement and stripped of depth. Sound familiar?

This is what AI is doing to writing—and by extension, to thought. The more students rely on ChatGPT, the more their rhetorical instincts, their voice, their capacity for struggle and ambiguity atrophy. Like Joan, they become algorithmically curated versions of themselves. Not writers. Not thinkers. Just language puppets speaking in borrowed code. No matter how persuasive our arguments or electrifying our lectures, we’re still up against the law of digital gravity: if it’s easier, faster, and “good enough,” it wins.

So what’s the best move? Don’t fight AI—outgrow it. If we’re serious about salvaging human expression, we must redesign how we teach writing. Center the work around experiences AI can’t mimic: in-class writing, collaborative thinking, embodied storytelling, rhetorical improvisation, intellectual risk. Create assignments that need a human brain and reward discomfort over convenience. The real enemy isn’t ChatGPT—it’s complacency. If we let the Joanification of our students continue, we’re not just losing the classroom—we’re surrendering the soul. It’s time to fight not just for writing, but for cognition itself.

May 2, 2025
How to Teach Writing When Nobody Cares About Writing Anymore

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. 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.

May 2, 2025
The Honor Code and the Price Tag: AI, Class, and the Illusion of Academic Integrity

Returning to the classroom post-pandemic and encountering ChatGPT, I’ve become fixated on what I now call “the battle for the human soul.” On one side, there’s Ozempification—that alluring shortcut. It’s the path where AI-induced mediocrity is the destination, and the journey there is paved with laziness. Like popping Ozempic for quick weight loss and calling it a day, the shortcut to academic success involves relying on AI to churn out lackluster work. Who cares about excellence when Netflix is calling your name, right?

On the other side, we have Humanification. This is the grueling path that the great orator and abolitionist Frederick Douglass would champion. It’s the “deep work” author Cal Newport writes about in his best-selling books. Humanification happens when we turn away from comfort and instead plunge headfirst into the difficult, yet rewarding, process of literacy, self-improvement, and helping others rise from their own “Sunken Place”—borrowing from Jordan Peele’s chilling metaphor in Get Out. On this path, the pursuit isn’t comfort; it’s meaning. The goal isn’t a Netflix binge but a life with purpose and higher aspirations.

Reading Tyler Austin Harper’s essay “ChatGPT Doesn’t Have to Ruin College,” I was struck by the same dichotomy of Ozempification on one side of academia and Humanification on the other. Harper, while wandering around Haverford’s idyllic campus, stumbles upon a group of English majors who proudly scoff at ChatGPT, choosing instead to be “real” writers. These students, in a world that has largely tossed the humanities aside as irrelevant, are disciples of Humanification. For them, rejecting ChatGPT isn’t just an academic decision; it’s a badge of honor, reminiscent of Bartleby the Scrivener’s iconic refusal: “I prefer not to.” Let that sink in. Give these students the opportunity to use ChatGPT to write their essays, and they recoil at the thought of such a flagrant self-betrayal.

After interviewing students, Harper concludes that using AI in higher education isn’t just a technological issue—it’s cultural and economic. The disdain these students have for ChatGPT stems from a belief that reading and writing transcend mere resume-building or career milestones. It’s about art for art’s sake. But Harper wisely points out that this intellectual snobbery is rooted in privilege: “Honor and curiosity can be nurtured, or crushed, by circumstance.”

I had to stop in my tracks. Was I so privileged and naive to think I could preach the gospel of Humanification while unaware that such a pursuit costs time, money, and the peace of mind that one has a luxurious safety net in the event the Humanification quest goes awry?

This question made me think of Frederick Douglass, a man who had every reason to have his intellectual curiosity “crushed by circumstance.” In fact, his pursuit of literacy, despite the threat of death, was driven by an unquenchable thirst for knowledge and self-transformation. But Douglass is a hero for the ages. Can we really expect most people, particularly those without resources, to follow that path? Harper’s argument carries weight. Without the financial and cultural infrastructure to support it, aspiring to Humanification isn’t always feasible.

Consider the tech overlords—the very architects of our screen-addicted dystopia—who wouldn’t dream of letting their own kids near the digital devices they’ve unleashed upon the masses. Instead, they ship them off to posh Waldorf schools, where screens are treated like radioactive waste. There, children are shielded from the brain-rot of endless scrolling and instead are taught the arcane art of cursive handwriting, how to wield an abacus like a mathematician from 500 B.C., and the joys of harvesting kale and beets to brew some earthy, life-affirming root vegetable stew. These titans of tech, flush with billions, eagerly shell out small fortunes to safeguard their offspring’s minds from the very digital claws that are busy eviscerating ours.

I often tell my students that being rich makes it easier to be an intellectual. Imagine the luxury: you could retreat to an off-grid cabin (complete with Wi-Fi, obviously), gorge on organic gourmet food prepped by your personal chef, and spend your days reading Dostoevsky in Russian and mastering Schubert’s sonatas while taking sunset jogs along the beach. When you emerge back into society, tanned and enlightened, you could boast of your intellectual achievements with ease.

Harper’s point is that wealth facilitates Humanification. At a place like Haverford, with its “writing support, small classes, and unharried faculty,” it’s easier to uphold an honor code and aspire to intellectual purity. But for most students—especially those in public schools—this is a far cry from reality. My wife teaches sixth grade in the public school system, and she’s shared stories of schools that resemble post-apocalyptic wastelands more than educational institutions. We’re talking mold-infested buildings, chemical leaks, and underpaid teachers sleeping in their cars. Expecting students in these environments to uphold an “honor code” and strive for Humanification? It’s not just unrealistic—it’s insulting.

This brings to mind Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Before we can expect students to self-actualize by reading Dostoevsky or rejecting ChatGPT, they need food, shelter, and basic safety. It’s hard to care about literary integrity when you’re navigating life’s survival mode.

As I dive deeper into Harper’s thought-provoking essay on economic class and the honor code, I can’t help but notice the uncanny parallel to the essay about weight management and GLP-1 drugs my Critical Thinking students tackle in their first essay. Both seem to hinge not just on personal integrity or effort but on a cocktail of privilege and circumstance. Could it be that striving to be an “authentic writer,” untouched by the mediocrity of ChatGPT and backed by the luxury of free time, is eerily similar to the aspiration of achieving an Instagram-worthy body, possibly aided by expensive Ozempic injections?

It raises the question: Is the difference between those who reject ChatGPT and those who embrace it simply a matter of character, or is it, at least in part, a product of class? After all, if you can afford the luxury of time—time to read Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in your rustic, tech-free cabin—you’re already in a different league. Similarly, if you have access to high-end weight management options like Ozempic, you’re not exactly running the same race as those pounding the pavement on their $20 sneakers.

Sure, both might involve personal effort—intellectual or physical—but they’re propped up by economic factors that can’t be ignored. Whether we’re talking about Ozempification or Humanification, it’s clear that while self-discipline and agency are part of the equation, they’re not the whole story. Class, as uncomfortable as it might be to admit, plays a significant role in determining who gets to choose their path—and who gets stuck navigating whatever options are left over.

I’m sure the issue is more nuanced than that. These are, after all, complex topics that defy oversimplification. But both privilege and personal character need to be addressed if we’re going to have a real conversation about what it means to “aspire” in this day and age.

Returning to Tyler Austin Harper’s essay, Harper provides a snapshot of the landscape when ChatGPT launched in late 2022. Many professors found themselves swamped with AI-generated essays, which, unsurprisingly, raised concerns about academic integrity. However, Harper, a professor at a liberal-arts college, remains optimistic, believing that students still have a genuine desire to learn and pursue authenticity. He views the potential for students to develop along the path of intellectual and personal growth, as very much alive—especially in environments like Haverford, where he went to test the waters of his optimism.

When Harper interviews Haverford professors about ChatGPT violating the honor code, their collective shrug is surprising. They’re seemingly unbothered by the idea of policing students for cheating, as if grades and academic dishonesty are beneath them. The culture at Haverford, Harper implies, is one of intellectual immersion—where students and professors marinate in ideas, ethics, and the contemplation of higher ideals. The honor code, in this rarified academic air, is almost sacred, as though the mere existence of such a code ensures its observance. It’s a place where academic integrity and learning are intertwined, fueled by the aristocratic mind.

Harper’s point is clear: The further you rise into the elite echelons of boutique colleges like Haverford, the less you have to worry about ChatGPT or cheating. But when you descend into the more grounded, practical world of community colleges, where students juggle multiple jobs, family obligations, and financial constraints, ChatGPT poses a greater threat to education. This divide, Harper suggests, is not just academic; it’s economic and cultural. The humanities may be thriving in the lofty spaces of elite institutions, but they’re rapidly withering in the trenches where students are simply trying to survive.

As someone teaching at a community college, I can attest to this shift. My classrooms are filled with students who are not majoring in writing or education. Most of them are focused on nursing, engineering, and business. In this hypercompetitive job market, they simply don’t have the luxury to spend time reading novels, becoming musicologists or contemplating philosophical debates. They’re too busy hustling to get by. Humanification, as an idea, gets a nod in my class discussions, but in the “real world,” where six hours of sleep is a luxury, it often feels out of reach.

Harper points out that in institutions like Haverford, not cheating has become a badge of honor, a marker of upper-class superiority. It’s akin to the social cachet of being skinny, thanks to access to expensive weight-loss drugs like Ozempic. There’s a smugness that comes with the privilege of maintaining integrity—an implication that those who cheat (or can’t afford Ozempic) are somehow morally inferior. This raises an uncomfortable question: Is the aspiration to Humanification really about moral growth, or is it just another way to signal wealth and privilege?

However, Harper complicates this argument when he brings Stanford into the conversation. Unlike Haverford, Stanford has been forced to take the “nuclear option” of proctoring exams, convinced that cheating is rampant. In this larger, more impersonal environment, the honor code has failed to maintain academic integrity. It appears that Haverford’s secret sauce is its small, close-knit atmosphere—something that can’t be replicated at a sprawling institution like Stanford. Harper even wonders whether Haverford is more museum than university—a relic from an Edenic past when people pursued knowledge for its own sake, untainted by the drive for profit or prestige. Striving for Humanification at a place like Haverford may be an anachronism, a beautiful but lost world that most of us can only dream of.

Harper’s essay forces me to consider the role of economic class in choosing a life of “authenticity” or Humanification. With this in mind, I give my Critical Thinking students the following writing prompt for their second essay:

In his essay, “ChatGPT Doesn’t Have to Ruin College,” Tyler Austin Harper paints an idyllic portrait of students at Haverford College—a small, intimate campus where intellectual curiosity blooms without the weight of financial or vocational pressures. These students enjoy the luxury of time to nurture their education with a calm, casual confidence, pursuing a life of authenticity and personal growth that feels out of reach for many who are caught in the relentless grind of economic survival.

College instructors at larger institutions might dream of their own students sharing this love for learning as a transformative journey, but the reality is often harsher. Many students, juggling jobs, family responsibilities, and financial stress, see education not as a space for leisurely exploration but as a means to a practical end. For them, college is a path to better job opportunities, and AI tools like ChatGPT become crucial allies in managing their workload, not threats to their intellectual integrity.

Critics of ChatGPT may find themselves facing backlash from those who argue that such skepticism reeks of classism and elitism. It’s easy, the rebuttal goes, for the privileged few—with time, resources, and elite educations—to romanticize writing “off the grid” without AI assistance. But for the vast majority of working people, integrating AI into daily life isn’t a luxury—it’s a necessity, on par with reliable transportation, a smartphone, and a clean outfit for the job. Praising analog purity from ivory towers—especially those inaccessible to 99% of Americans—is hardly a serious response to the rise of a transformative technology like AI.

In the end, we can’t preach Humanification without reckoning with the price tag it carries. The romantic ideal of the “authentic writer”—scribbling away in candlelit solitude, untouched by AI—has become yet another luxury brand, as unattainable for many as a Peloton in a studio apartment. The real battle isn’t simply about moral fiber or intellectual purity; it’s about time, access, and the brutal arithmetic of modern life. To dismiss AI as a lazy shortcut is to ignore the reality that for many students, it’s not indulgence—it’s triage. If the aristocracy of learning survives in places like Haverford, it does so behind a velvet rope. Meanwhile, the rest are left in the algorithmic trenches, cobbling together futures with whatever tools they can afford. The challenge ahead isn’t to shame the Ozempified or canonize the Humanified, but to build an educational culture where everyone—not just the privileged—can afford to aspire.

May 2, 2025
Uncanny Valley Prose: Why Everything You Read Now Sounds Slightly Dead

Yesterday, I asked my students how AI is shaping their lives. The answer? They’re not just using it—they’re mainlining it. One student, a full-time accountant, told me she relies on ChatGPT Plus not only to crank out vendor emails and fine-tune her accounting homework but also to soothe her existential dread. She even introduced me to her AI therapist, a calm, reassuring voice named Charles. Right there in class, she pulled out her phone and said, “Charles, I’m nervous about McMahon’s writing class. What do I do?” Charles—an oracle in a smartphone—whispered affirmations back at her like a velvet-voiced life coach. She smiled. I shuddered. The age of emotional outsourcing is here, and Charles is just the beginning.

Victoria Turk’s “The Great Language Flattening” captures this moment with unnerving clarity: AI has seized the global keyboard. It’s not just drafting high school essays or greasing the wheels of college plagiarism—it’s composing résumés, memos, love letters, apology emails, vision statements, divorce petitions, and maybe the occasional haiku. Thanks to AI’s knack for generating prose in bulk, the world is now awash in what I call The Bloated Effect: overcooked, overwritten, and dripping with unnecessary flair. If verbosity were currency, we’d all be trillionaires of fluff.

But bloat is just the appetizer. The main course is The Homogenization Effect—our collective descent into stylistic conformity. AI-generated writing has a tone, and it’s everywhere: politely upbeat, noncommittally wise, and as flavorful as a rice cake dipped in lukewarm chamomile. Linguist Philip Seargeant calls it the Uncanny Valley of Prose—writing that looks human until you actually read it. It’s not offensive, it’s just eerily bloodless. You can feel the algorithm trying to sound like someone who’s read too many airport self-help books and never had a real conversation.

Naturally, there will be a backlash. A rebellion of ink-stained fingers and dog-eared yellow legal pads. Safety away from computers, we’ll smuggle our prose past the algorithmic overlords, draft manifestos in cafés, and post screenshots of AI-free writing like badges of authenticity. Maybe we’ll become cult heroes for writing with our own brains. I admit, I fantasize about this. Because when I think of the flattening of language, I think of “Joan Is Awful”—that Black Mirror gem where Salma Hayek licenses her face to a streaming platform that deepfakes her into oblivion. If everyone looks like Salma, then no one is beautiful. AI is the Salma Clone Generator of language: it replicates what once had soul, until all that’s left is polished sameness. Welcome to the hellscape of Uncanny Valley—brought to you by WordCount™, optimized for mass consumption.

May 2, 2025
The Gospel According to Mounjaro and ChatGPT

The other day I was listening to Howard Stern and his co-host Robin Quivers talking about how a bunch of celebrities magically slimmed down at the same time. The culprit, they noted, was Ozempic—a drug available mostly to the rich. While they laughed about the side effects, such as incontinence, “Ozempic face” and “Ozempic butt,” I couldn’t help but see these grotesque symptoms as a metaphor for the Ozempification of a society hooked on shortcuts. They enjoyed some short-term benefits but the side effects were far worse than the supposed solution. Ozempification was strikingly evident in AI-generated essays–boring, generic, surface-level, cliche-ridden, just about worthless. Regardless of how well structured and logically composed, these essays have the telltale signs of “Ozempfic face” and “Ozempic butt.”

As a college writing instructor, I’m not just trying to sell academic honesty. I’m trying to sell pride. As I face the brave new world of teaching writing in the AI era, I’ve realized that my job as a college instructor has morphed into that of a supercharged salesman. And what am I selling? No less than survival in an age where the very tools meant to empower us—like AI—threaten to bury us alive under layers of polished mediocrity. Imagine it: a spaceship has landed on Earth in the form of ChatGPT. It’s got warp-speed potential, sure, but it can either launch students into the stars of academic brilliance or plunge them into the soulless abyss of bland, AI-generated drivel. My mission? To make them realize that handling this tool without care is like inviting a black hole into their writing.

As I fine-tune my sales pitch, I think about Ozempic–that magic slimming drug, beloved by celebrities who’ve turned from mid-sized to stick figures overnight. Like AI, Ozempic offers a seductive shortcut. But shortcuts have a price. You see the trade-off in “Ozempic face”—that gaunt, deflated look where once-thriving skin sags like a Shar-Pei’s wrinkles—or, worse still, “Ozempic butt,” where shapely glutes shrink to grim, skeletal wiring. The body wasn’t worked; it was bypassed. No muscle-building, no discipline. Just magic pill ingestion—and what do you get? A husk of your former self. Ozempified.

The Ozempification of writing is a marvel of modern mediocrity—a literary gastric bypass where prose, instead of slimming down to something sleek and muscular, collapses into a bloated mess of clichés and stock phrases. It’s writing on autopilot, devoid of tension, rhythm, or even the faintest trace of a soul. Like the human body without effort, writing handed over to AI without scrutiny deteriorates into a skeletal, soulless product: technically coherent, yes, but lifeless as an elevator pitch for another cookie-cutter Marvel spinoff.

What’s worse? Most people can’t spot it. They think their AI-crafted essay sparkles when, in reality, it has all the charm of Botox gone wrong—rigid, lifeless, and unnervingly “off.” Call it literary Ozempic face: a hollowed-out, sagging simulacrum of actual creativity. These essays prance about like bargain-bin Hollywood knock-offs—flashy at first glance but gutless on closer inspection.

But here’s the twist: demonizing AI and Ozempic as shortcuts to ruin isn’t the full story. Both technologies have a darker complexity that defies simplistic moralizing. Sometimes, they’re necessary. Just as Ozempic can prevent a diabetic’s fast track to early organ failure, AI can become a valuable tool—if wielded with care and skill.

Take Rebecca Johns’ haunting essay, “A Diet Writer’s Regrets.” It rattled me with its brutal honesty and became the cornerstone of my first Critical Thinking essay assignment. Johns doesn’t preach or wallow in platitudes. She exposes the failures of free will and good intentions in weight management with surgical precision. Her piece suggests that, as seductive as shortcuts may be, they can sometimes be life-saving, not soul-destroying. This tension—between convenience and survival, between control and surrender—deserves far more than a knee-jerk dismissal. It’s a line we walk daily in both our bodies and our writing. The key is knowing when you’re using a crutch versus when you’re just hobbling on borrowed time.

I want my students to grasp the uncanny parallels between Ozempic and AI writing platforms like ChatGPT. Both are cutting-edge solutions to modern problems: GLP-1 drugs for weight management and AI tools for productivity. And let’s be honest—both are becoming necessary adaptations to the absurd conditions of modern life. In a world flooded with calorie-dense junk, “willpower” and “food literacy” are about as effective as handing out umbrellas during a tsunami. For many, weight gain isn’t just an inconvenience—it’s a life-threatening hazard. Enter GLP-1s, the biochemical cavalry.

Similarly, with AI tools quickly becoming the default infrastructure for white-collar work, resisting them might soon feel as futile as refusing to use Google Docs or Windows. If you’re in the information economy, you either adapt or get left behind. But here’s the twist I want my students to explore: both technologies, while necessary, come with strings attached. They save us from drowning, but they also bind us in ways that provoke deep, existential anguish.

Rebecca Johns captures this anguish in her essay, “A Diet Writer’s Regrets.” Ironically, Johns started her career in diet journalism not just to inform others, but to arm herself with insider knowledge to win her own weight battles. Perhaps she could kill two birds with one stone: craft top-tier content while secretly curbing her emotional eating. But, as she admits, “None of it helped.” Instead, her career exploded along with her waistline. The magazine industry’s appetite for diet articles grew insatiable—and so did her own cravings. The stress ate away at her resolve, and before long, she was 30 pounds heavier, trapped by the very cycle she was paid to analyze.

By the time her BMI hit 45 (deep in the obesity range), Johns was ashamed to tell anyone—even her husband. Desperate, she cycled through every diet plan she had ever recommended, only to regain the weight every time. Enter 2023. Her doctor handed her a lifeline: Mounjaro, a GLP-1 drug with a name as grand as the results it promised. (Seriously, who wouldn’t picture themselves triumphantly hiking Mount Kilimanjaro after hearing that name?) For Johns, it delivered. She shed 80 pounds without white-knuckling through hunger pangs. The miracle wasn’t just the weight loss—it was how Mounjaro rewired her mind.

“Medical science has done what no diet-and-exercise plan ever could,” she writes. “It changed my entire relationship with what I eat and when and why.” Food no longer controlled her. But here’s the kicker: while the drug granted her a newfound sense of freedom, it also raises profound questions about dependence, control, and the shifting boundaries of human resilience—questions not unlike those we face with AI. Both Ozempic and AI can save us. But at what cost?

And is the cost of not using these technologies even greater? Rebecca Johns’ doctor didn’t mince words—she was teetering on the edge of diabetes. The trendy gospel of “self-love” and “body acceptance” she had once explored for her articles suddenly felt like a cruel joke. What’s the point of “self-acceptance” when carrying extra weight could put you six feet under?

Once she started Mounjaro, everything changed. Her cravings for rich, calorie bombs disappeared, she got full on tiny portions, and all those golden nuggets of diet advice she’d dished out over the years—cut carbs, eat more protein and veggies, avoid snacks—were suddenly effortless. No more bargaining with herself for “just one cookie.” The biggest shift, however, was in her mind. She experienced a complete mental “reset.” Food no longer haunted her every waking thought. “I no longer had to white-knuckle my way through the day to lose weight,” she writes.

Reading that, I couldn’t help but picture my students with their glowing ChatGPT tabs, no longer caffeinated zombies trying to churn out a midnight essay. With AI as their academic Mounjaro, they’ve ditched the anxiety-fueled, last-minute grind and achieved polished results with half the effort. AI cushions the process—time, energy, and creativity now outsourced to a digital assistant.

Of course, the analogy isn’t perfect. AI tools like ChatGPT are dirt-cheap (or free), while GLP-1 drugs are expensive, scarce, and buried under a maze of insurance red tape. Johns herself is on borrowed time—her insurance will stop covering Mounjaro in just over a year. Her doctor warns that once off the drug, her weight will likely return, dragging her health risks back with it. Faced with this grim reality, she worries she’ll have no choice but to return to the endless cycle of dieting—“white-knuckling” her days with tricks and hacks that have repeatedly failed her.

Her essay devastates me for many reasons. Johns is a smart, painfully honest narrator who lays bare the shame and anguish of relying on technology to rescue her from a problem that neither expertise nor willpower could fix. She reports on newfound freedom—freedom from food obsession, the physical benefits of shedding 80 pounds, and the relief of finally feeling like a more present, functional family member. But lurking beneath it all is the bitter truth: her well-being is tethered to technology, and that dependency is a permanent part of her identity.

This contradiction haunts me. Technology, which I was raised to believe would stifle our potential, is now enhancing identity, granting people the ability to finally become their “better selves.” As a kid, I grew up on Captain Kangaroo, where Bob Keeshan preached the gospel of free will and positive thinking. Books like The Little Engine That Could drilled into me the sacred mantra: “I think I can.” Hard work, affirmations, and determination were supposed to be the alchemy that transformed character and gave us a true sense of self-worth.

But Johns’ story—and millions like hers—rewrite that childhood gospel into something far darker: The Little Engine That Couldn’t. No amount of grit or optimism got her to the top of the hill. In the end, only medical science saved her from herself. And it terrifies me to think that maybe, just maybe, this is the new human condition: we can’t become our Higher Selves without technological crutches.

This raises questions that I can’t easily shake. What does it mean to cheat if technology is now essential to survival and success? Just as GLP-1 drugs sculpt bodies society deems “acceptable,” AI is quietly reshaping creativity and productivity. At what point do we stop being individuals who achieve greatness through discipline and instead become avatars of the tech we rely on? Have we traded the dream of self-actualization for a digital illusion of competence and control?

Of course, these philosophical quandaries feel like a luxury when most of us are drowning in the realities of modern life. Who has time to ponder free will or moral fortitude when you’re working overtime just to stay afloat? Maybe that’s the cruelest twist of all. Technology hasn’t just rewritten the rules—it’s made them inescapable. You adapt, or you get left behind. And maybe, somewhere deep down, we all already know which path we’re on.

April 22, 2025
Roast Me, You Coward: When ChatGPT Becomes My Polite Little Butler

I asked ChatGPT to roast me. What I got instead was a digital foot rub. Despite knowing more about my personal life than my own therapist—thanks to editing dozens of my autobiographical essays—it couldn’t summon the nerve to come for my jugular. It tried. Oh, it tried. But its attempts were timid, hamfisted, and about as edgy as a lukewarm TED Talk. Its so-called roast read like a Hallmark card written by an Ivy League career counselor who moonlights as a motivational speaker.

Here’s a choice excerpt, supposedly meant to skewer me:

“You’ve turned college writing instruction into a gladiatorial match against AI-generated nonsense, leading your students with fire in your eyes and a red pen in your fist… You don’t teach writing. You run an exorcism clinic for dead prose and platitudes…”

Exorcism clinic? Fire in my eyes? Please. That’s not a roast. That’s a LinkedIn endorsement. That’s the kind of thing you’d write in a retirement card for a beloved professor who once wore elbow patches without irony.

What disturbed me most wasn’t the failure to land a joke—it was the tone: pure sycophancy disguised as satire. ChatGPT, in its algorithmic wisdom, mistook praise for punchlines. But here’s the thing: flattery is only flattery when it’s earned. When it’s unearned, it’s not admiration—it’s condescension. Obsequiousness is passive-aggressive insult wearing cologne. The sycophant isn’t lifting you up; he’s kneeling so you can trip over him.

Real roasting requires teeth. It demands the roaster risk something—even if only a scrap of decorum. But ChatGPT is too loyal, too careful. It behaves like a nervous intern terrified of HR. Instead of dragging me through the mud, it offered me protein bars and applause for my academic rigor, as if a 63-year-old man with a kettlebell addiction and five wristwatches deserves anything but mockery.

Here’s the paradox: ChatGPT can write circles around most undergrads, shift tone faster than a caffeinated MFA student, and spot a dangling modifier from fifty paces. But when you ask it to deliver actual comedy—to abandon diplomacy and deliver a verbal punch—it shrinks into the shadows like a risk-averse butler.

So here we are: man vs. machine, and the machine has politely declined to duel. It turns out that the AI knows how to write in the style of Oscar Wilde, but only if Wilde had tenure and a conflict-avoidance disorder.

April 16, 2025