Margin Notes

John Warner introduces More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI with an anecdote about reading an article about how ChatGPT means the death of High School English class. His immediate response was, “Lord, I hope so.” He explains that “…for over a decade, I’ve been trying to kill the high school essay that ChatGPT so effortlessly generates.” If you have read Warner’s previous book, Why They can’t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities, you know he is a tireless advocate for creating the conditions for engaging students in meaningful and authentic writing instead of producing “writing-related simulations, formulaic responses for the purpose of passing standardized assessments.”

Warner sees AI entering the writing classroom as an opportunity, not a threat:

Rather than seeing ChatGPT as a threat that will destroy things of value, we should be viewing it as an opportunity to reconsider exactly what we value and why we value those things. No one was stunned by the interpretive insights of ChatGPT-produced text because there were none. People were freaking out over B-level (or worse) student work because the bar we’ve been using to judge student writing is attached to the wrong values.

Before moving into an exploration of AI in the writing classroom, Warner reflects on the qualities of generative AI that readers will need think critically about as they navigate the topic. Generative AI:

• is founded on the unauthorized use of intellectual property
• is built on a foundation of exploited labor
• is very, very bad for the environment
• will permanently enshrine existing structural biases
• could end the world due to the outsourcing of human judgement to algorithmic reasoning

In Warner’s opinion, writing is a “fully embodied experience’ that requires the writer to think and feel, bringing their unique intelligences to the writing and attempting to demonstrate them to their audience. ChatGPT is the opposite—an averaging of intelligence that results in pattern-driven text. Warner reminds us that writing is:

• thinking
• feeling
• a practice
• impacted by our reading

He views the first step in confronting what ChatGPT means for the kind of writing and reading students should be doing in school, is ascertaining what is meaningful and valuable about what we are asking them to do as readers and writers. According to Warner, ChatGPT isn’t threatening anything meaningful because it isn’t capable of producing output that conveys meaning; he points out to readers that we should always be mindful that Chat GPT is actually driven by automation and not artificial intelligence.

There are three principles that can guide educators in thinking about how to make ChatGPT irrelevant in the work we are asking readers to do, thus making outsourcing it less attractive.

Fostering engagement through appreciation.

“…writing that values the process, and the practice-building aspects of these activities, rather than reducing them to limited proficiencies that fit on a standardized test, provides an experience which helps raise student self-knowledge and self-efficacy when it comes to writing.”

Building rigor through authentic challenge.

“By framing [writing] experiences as problem-solving rather than students thinking about writing to ‘standards’ that are largely abstract, they must engage with the specific needs of the audience and the demands of the occasion. They are learning that every piece of writing is a custom job rather than something written to a template for a grade, and that no two writers will produce the same piece, even if they are writing from similar material, like writing reviews of the same movie.”

Making learning visible through reflection.

“We’re looking to understand what’s been learned so that students can take ownership of and then build on that learning from experience to experience. For that reflection, during the experience, I ask students to consider the following:

• What have you discovered that is new to you?
• What line, idea, or concept occurred to you while you were writing that you hadn’t planned on?
• What are you confident in? What are you confused by?

After the experience is complete and students have received feedback and commentary from me, I ask them to reflect on some additional questions:

• What do you know now that you didn’t know before? (This is a question of both knowledge of subject matter and the writing process.)
• What did you do in completing this experience that you’re going to do again in the future?
• What did you do in completing this experience that you think would be a bad idea to repeat?”

In the book’s final section, Warner offers a framework for thinking about AI:

Resist

1. Resist anthropomorphizing generative AI: “To the extent that technology is intelligent, it is not the intelligence of humans.”
2. Resist giving into technological determinism: “While technologies have a profound effect on our lives and may seem to exert a kind of deterministic pressure, we should not give into the notion that whatever is coming is inevitable and we are powerless to resist future developments, either collectively or individually.”
3. Resist turning over inherently human activities to AI: “If ChatGPT can do it, it’s probably not worth doing by human, and it very well may not be worth doing at all.”
4. Resist allowing our labour to be degraded or destroyed: “Some AI-driven disruption of labor is inevitable. It’s already happening. As both laborers and consumers of the labor of others, when confronted with an AI-produced work, we should ask ourselves how we would feel if all that category of work were done by AI. AI writing tutors are pitched as a way for teachers to save time, but how would we feel if all writing feedback in school came via AI?”
5. Resist the economic style of reasoning: “The economic style of reasoning involves identifying desirable outcomes as measured according to economic values, such as speed and efficiency…But efficiency is not a neutral measurement we necessarily associate with human well-being. We don’t apply efficiency as a measurement of our relationships or our favorite hobbies. An efficient vacation is not necessarily a good vacation. Good writing is not judged by the speed with which it is produced. Learning is not better when it happens more quickly.”

Renew

1. Creatures, not machines: “Creatures are distinguished from machines by our dependence on the natural world and interdependence on one another. Creatures exist in an ecosystem that involves both competition and cooperation, but ultimately, a successful ecosystem runs on a sustainable framework in which each creature receives what they need to go about their own brand of creature-ness.”
2. Individuals are not averages: “One of the ideas we must renew is that we are not the sum of our averages. When we reduce individuals to averages and then constrain their behaviors based on those averages, we are restricting freedoms. Generative AI content is, by definition, a great averaging of what’s in the world. An embrace of this output is a kind of capitulation to the machine, rather than staying true to our nature as creatures.”
3. You’ve gotta have taste: “…charting the rise of algorithmic recommendations and how recommendation engines now dominate in terms of the media and content we are exposed to on a daily (or, really, minute-by-minute) basis…the first step to moving beyond Filterworld is to start to recognize when and how we are being steered by the algorithms. The next is to do the work of identifying and understanding and owning your own taste.”
4. Shrinking the circle: “Renewing our sense of community independent of the looming presence of the algorithm is a way to give ourselves some ground to stand on as we evaluate the usefulness of the technology to the experiences of our lives.”
5. Taste, specialize, experience: “In my view, the goal is to create ourselves as individuals through personal discernment. To practice our taste and express our values. We bring these individual selves into communities of other individuals who have their own unique world views. Here, then is an ecosystem of interdependent individuals, a collection of intelligences existing without being flattened into an algorithm.”

Explore

1. Embrace generative AI as a public issue: “Think of artificial intelligence as a new form of public infrastructure that requites broad discussion and regulation to ensure safe and equal access to whatever it has to offer. Obviously, this means legislative bodies at both the state and federal level should be taking up the issue, but it is also a matter of recognizing the importance of acting through the lens of a shared public problem closer to home.”
2. Find your guides: “Our communities inevitably must contain both those with whom we agree and those with whom we differ. As long as they are willing to see themselves as a member of the community with the well-being of the community in mind, they should be welcome.”