Writing Critically with AI
On September 13, I invited Jane Rosenzweig, Director of the Harvard College Writing Center, to join me for a lively conversation on "Writing Critically with AI".
In the first hour of this free WriteSPACE Special Event, Jane and I discussed the risks and rewards of writing and teaching writing in the age of generative AI. In the second hour, we led a hands-on discussion and workshop for WriteSPACE members, digging deeper into some of the questions addressed in the first hour.
Here’s WriteSPACE Event Manager Amy Lewis’ personal account of the live event:
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This popular live Special Event featuring Helen Sword and Jane Rosenzweig offered a thought-provoking and insightful journey into the world of Generative AI and writing. Or should that be GenAI versus writing? While the jury may still be out on the impact that new AI writing tools are having on authors, students, and teachers, this in-depth conversation afforded a great opportunity to hear both sides of the debate.
Some memorable quotes from Jane:
We survived Facebook, which was born and raised at Harvard while I was there … Then things were peaceful for a while, and now we have ChatGPT.
I started becoming quietly horrified by myself at my computer. And I kept thinking, I need to write about this, look what this can do!
Just because you can outsource your writing to a machine doesn’t mean you should.
Now that artificial intelligence is competent enough to research and write — and grade — for us, can we all just head to the beach? Jane and Helen were pretty clear that before you don your bikini, it’s important to consider the repercussions. Writing helps us develop critical thinking skills; so writers (particularly student writers) who use AI text generators may be missing out on learning those crucial skills.
Helen and Jane expertly weighed up the benefits and drawbacks of generative AI, which I’ve cut into bite-sized morsels for you.
The good news!
If you know how to be cautious about fact-checking the content, GenAI tools can play great research assistants. They deliver shortcuts to obtaining key facts and summarizing long passages into helpful abstracts, and they excel at writing very plain business emails and strategies (helpful for writers who want to prioritize their time so they can focus on more creative tasks).
For teachers, the conversations around ChatGPT can spark debate and challenge students. GenAI also offers opportunities for collaborative work, illuminating discussions, and comparisons of writing styles.
The bad news:
Students are using these tools for things like brainstorming, style edits, and even, in the most alarming cases, for drafting work that they intend to pass off on their own. If they haven’t yet learnt the skills necessary to critically assess the output, they may produce work that is less creative, nuanced, unique, or even accurate than what they could and should have done on their own (ChatGPT is notorious for “hallucinating” and falsifying quotes!)
Is GenAI really ethical? In simple lay terms, large language models use algorithms that function a bit like predictive text messaging, using large data sets to predict the most likely answers. But we don’t know much about how these GenAI systems are trained. Which part of the internet is their training data coming from? Because companies like OpenAI are not disclosing this information to us, there is a risk that serious violations of copyright are being perpetrated by the bots — to say nothing of their perpetuation of cultural biases and stereotypes.
These systems require tons of water to be powered, quite literally! For each conversation of roughly 20-50 questions and answers, ChatGPT needs to 'drink' a 500 ml bottle of water. Now imagine the water usage with billions of curious users. What’s more, the servers are often located in countries that can’t afford to see their water supplies depleted so drastically. Check out this article for more.
The human labor training element of GenAI systems is often outsourced to developing countries where workers experience unfair working conditions. Jane recommends the recent New York Magazine article Inside the AI Factory.
And if that’s not enough to contend with already, here are a few more unsettling questions for the future:
Can ChatGPT get a kind of mad cow disease for chatbots? As the chatbots pump more and more material into the body of sources that ChatGPT is drawing on, the range and quality of the new content will likely degrade. ChatGPT will eventually start consuming its own content (the only kind of recycling I’d hate to see, and one that is already starting to happen).
We unconsciously suggest that these bots have intelligence when we say ‘ChatGPT told me…” Is it helpful to anthropomorphize these machines? Should we be calling this technology cute nicknames like ‘ChattieG’ and ‘Claude,’ or should we refer to chatbots generically as ‘artificial text predictors’? Jane recommends Dr Emily Bender’s linguistic take on this question; check out her podcast Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000.
Do people want to consume creative content (like TV or films) that is generated by AI? What does this mean for artists and designers? What new laws will be needed to protect creatives’ intellectual property? On a broader scale, will jobs be lost to AI? Or will they just become more alien and tedious? Will we need to implement a universal basic income in the future?
In the second hour of this intriguing session (for WriteSPACE members only), we delved into practical problems faced by writers and teachers alike, with Jane providing her insightful expertise as a professor who tackles these problems on a daily basis. Colleagues ask her questions such as the following:
“As head of the department, I’ve got to take a stand on GenAI; what should I advise to the faculty?”
“How can I ensure that students know the dangers of using these tools for their assignments?”
“What is the difference between plagiarism and GenAI text?”
A big thank you to Jane and Helen for this informative and thought-provoking Special Event, and thank you to all the participants for sharing your positivity and unique opinions. For more of Jane’s insights, subscribe to her newsletter Writing Hacks.
See you again at the next event!
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