The AI Challenge to Student Writing

IN HIS BOOK The Philosophy of Literary Form, Kenneth Burke proposes that academic discourse is much like an endless conversation at a party. He writes:

You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about.… You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you.… The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress.

Like many teachers of writing, reading, research, and analysis, I use this model of academic conversation to impress upon students that they are, in fact, entering a conversation when they do academic work: they are participating in a dynamic, extended, and evolving exchange of ideas that relies upon their integrity as individuals communicating with other social beings to whom they are responsibly tied. Constructing that conversation—doing research, reading closely, and thinking critically about what is at stake—is an essential part of a student’s learning process, as is relying upon the integrity of their conversational partners as people who have a stake in what is said and have an interest in building a community around the conversation.

One of the fundamental challenges AI poses to academic discourse and education—as I see it—is that it substitutes the perspectives of individual people communicating with one another with a conversant who is, in one sense, “everyone” (AI large language models pull from vast stores of information on the web to make probabilistic guesses about what “one” might say given a specific prompt) and also “no one”—it represents no individual person who has a specific perspective or who will take responsibility for what they say. This is not to say that they aren’t capable of doing amazing work representing the contours of an academic argument, or raising issues in a student’s mind they may not have considered. (They also do a bang-up job producing prose in standard English, language that most students consider “professional” or “academic.”)

But I would argue they also do a disservice to students by 1) providing shortcuts to the development of important critical thinking, close reading, and analytical skills and 2) making standard English ever more standard, eroding students’ abilities to cultivate a specific “voice,” one that might allow them to enter an academic conversation—or any form of social communication—in memorable, powerful, and original ways.

In important ways, our goal with students at the University of Portland is not that they learn to write, but that they write to learn: that they engage in a process of reading, critical thinking, and drafting that isn’t oriented around a product (the student essay), but towards the process itself and engagement in scholarly communication, an engagement that is community-based and perhaps surprisingly intimate, relying upon the idea that individuals situated in a particular place, at a particular time, might have something vital to share with other individuals situated in different places, at different times. Former US Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky forcefully articulates this idea in the introduction to his book The Sounds of Poetry, in which he writes:

An extraordinary system of grunts and mouth-noises evolved by the human primate has been used as the material of art. Poetry in this vocal and intellectual sense is an ancient art or technology.… I presume that the technology of poetry, using the human body as its medium, evolved for specific uses: to hold things in memory, both within and beyond the individual life span; to achieve intensity and sensuous appeal; to express feelings and ideas rapidly and memorably. To share those feelings and ideas with companions, and also with the dead and with those to come after us.

In this light, the opportunity to share our feelings and ideas through writing is an extraordinary honor and also an act of vulnerability and intimacy. As poet Louise Glück put it in her Nobel Prize acceptance speech, “Some poets do not see reaching many in spatial terms, as in the filled auditorium. They see reaching many temporally, sequentially, many over time, into the future, but in some profound way these readers always come singly, one by one.”

What do these poetic reflections have to do with education and students’ work at the university? I think they have a lot to do with it, because ultimately—even as we invite students to join academic conversations that are larger than themselves—we ask them to do so individually, because we earnestly want to know their perspective. And even—or especially—if they think they don’t have one, it’s our responsibility as educators to help them find, articulate, and take responsibility for it. Again, it is this process of discovery, rather than the essay-as-product, that is our goal.

AI poses a real and novel challenge to that goal. Creating an academic integrity policy that addresses students’ process is incredibly difficult because we don’t have conventions for citing assistance in that process if it doesn’t involve direct quotation. The Works Cited section has been our safeguard, but because AI results are non-reproducible or traceable, they don’t look like conventional sources a reader might choose to follow-up with. In the present moment, individual instructors have strikingly different attitudes towards this dilemma: some see consultation with AI tools as little different from using Google, while others would like to block student use completely. Still others have asked students to cite AI use in prefatory notes or acknowledgments, in a “Process Letter” students include with their work, or in a “Works Consulted” section. We’re still working on this as an institution. The Writing Center, the Center for Teaching and Learning, and the faculty Committee on Academic Regulations are together working on a syllabus statement that protects students from inadvertent violations of academic integrity and protects faculty from what many see as an obstacle to helping students achieve the reading, critical thinking, and writing skills it has always been our ambition to cultivate in each individual student.

SARAH WEIGER teaches and studies nineteenth century literature and the environmental humanities. Her recent work is on the natural history writing of Henry David Thoreau and Romantic literature’s treatment of weather and climate.