Artificial Intelligence, Neural Transformation, and Your Own Unique Voice: an open letter to my students

Dear Students,

Please read this letter carefully. I am writing from my heart.

Writing makes you smarter. Researching, gathering facts, organizing those facts, forming an opinion about them, turning that opinion into a thesis, and then creating a reasoned argument in support of that thesis is a difficult yet rewarding task. It is also an essential skill for any professional. Professionals make recommendations and decisions. When they do so, they must explain why they made that recommendation or decision. That involves making an argument. Making an argument involves writing, in one form or another.

Problematically, we live in an age in which many students are depriving themselves of this intellectually formative process. They let AI do the writing and thinking for them, depriving their brain of the opportunity to be transformed by hard work. They are cheating themselves of the opportunity to become smarter, more capable, and more confident. Many students are outsourcing their personal growth to AI, when they need to be growing beyond AI.

AI writes competently but lacks personality. It can generate an abstract opinion but can’t provide human insight into a particular problem. We all have different lives, hence different experiences, so we all approach problems in different ways. On a team, different persons come up with different solutions and debate the helpfulness of those different solutions. Then, the team chooses the one that they think will work best.

Or, within a community, we can simply learn from each other about what it is like to be us—what is it like to be from the city, from the country, to be male, to be female, to be nonbinary, to be an immigrant, to be native born? We can share these perspectives with one another and grow as individuals, which is to grow as a society.

AI can’t do any of this. It writes from one place: the internet. It generalizes, taking all the specificity of the different locations on the internet and turning that specificity into one generic piece of writing. It doesn’t grow as a person through this experience, it can’t empathize with anyone’s experience, it cannot become more compassionate or wise. It just takes words and rearranges them into new sentences, without understanding what it has done. It cannot feel what its own writing means.

But you can. The process of reading, writing, debating, and pondering (the process of a liberal arts education), will change you. It will make you a more capable professional, a more critical citizen, and (possibly) a deeper person.

But not if you have AI do all your thinking for you. If you do that, then you will remain unchanged and all the time and money you have spent will be wasted.

Development of your own unique writing voice is not a waste; it is professionally necessary. Graduate schools do not want to read application essays that sound like AI; they want to hear about you. Managers don’t want reports from you that they could have completed themselves with an AI prompt; they want your expertise. Journals simply can’t have every essay sound the same, like they were all written by AI; journals need you.

For the above reasons, I do not want AI to become your voice. I want you to develop your own voice, because the world needs your voice. It needs you and everything that you have to offer the world as a unique person.

You cannot be replaced by AI. But if you overuse AI, so that you are indistinguishable from AI, then you will be replaceable by AI. I don’t want that to happen.

To be clear, you will use AI throughout your life. I realize this. I use AI when I need a quick answer to a question. It saves me the time of scouring the internet for the information that I need. I use it to find good movies to watch in a particular genre on a certain platform. AI will save us a lot of tedious work, performing simple tasks that take a lot of time. It will also survey vast amounts of data to discover patterns that no human could. Those are good things and, in the field of medical science, will save lives, thank God.

At the same time, AI is currently limited in its abilities, and may be permanently so. It is unoriginal, regurgitating (in a reworked fashion) what people have already thought. It does pretty well writing short essays, but the longer the assignment, the more discombobulated it gets, repeating itself and/or leaving huge gaps in its argument. AI does not know that there are important facts it does not know. In other words, it has a hard time accounting for “unknown unknowns,” which can make for bad decisions. It cannot write a compelling novel in a distinct voice (read Demon Copperhead). Quite possibly, it will never be able to, because it’s not human.

Nevertheless, AI is here to stay. But I want you to live with AI, not under AI—intellectually or emotionally. For this reason, I do not allow any AI use for writing in any of my classes. The work you turn in must be the product of your brain, so that it will have changed your brain, so that you have become smarter.

For the above reasons, one aspect of your paper grade will be the uniqueness, originality, and humanity of your writing. This aspect of your grade will be subjective (qualitative, opinion, subject to interpretation) not objective (quantitative, fact, demonstrable to all). But some subjectivity in grading is unavoidable, since we are all subjects (persons with a deep internal life) writing to other subjects.

I am not naive; I know that some students will slip AI writing by me. By submitting AI work as their own, they will have cheated their fellow students and lied to me. More importantly, they will have impeded their own development, to their own eventual harm.

Consider this essay: Do you think that AI wrote it, or do you think that I wrote it? Does it have the ring of technology or the ring of humanity? Like you, human beings can distinguish artificial and authentic voices, and they want to read an authentic voice. Your voice is one of them.

I hope that this letter encourages you to develop your own, unique voice, a voice distinct from AI, which is the only voice that the world needs. I look forward to reading your writing.

Thank you,

Jon Paul

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Jon Paul Sydnor teaches World Religions at Emmanuel College in Boston.