I’m reading a book by a well-known edtech leader about AI. He’s a person whose opinion I respect, and he sees a great deal of potential in Generative AI, appropriately so.
He starts the book by describing how he had used AI to help his 11-year-old daughter write a story. The Gen AI model took the role of the story’s main character and then engaged in a dialogue with his daughter, brainstorming the story with her and filling in ideas.
It sounded like the girl really enjoyed the opportunity to engage in collaborative storymaking, but then I got to thinking about the opportunity that was lost--the opportunity for productive struggle that is part of every writer’s process. And that got me thinking about my own productive struggles, and maybe sometimes not-so-productive struggles, in all of the writing assignments I completed in my 16 years of formal education.
Writing is much more than just writing. For me, at least, the actual writing part of putting one’s thoughts into words is only about 20% of the process. The other 80% is the thinking, the analysis, the judgements, the deciding of what I want to communicate and the figuring out of how to make sure my reader gets a decent return on their investment of reading time. It’s the productive struggle. And it’s that struggle, which I engaged in hundreds of times in school, that taught me to think critically, to challenge my own and others’ logic, to consider ideas and information from multiple perspectives, to weigh and choose words with care, all abilities that I’ve used every day of my professional life
It's certainly true that AI has a great deal of potential, and I’ve personally seen how that potential is going to be realized to students’ benefit in tutoring and other applications. I’m a big fan of that. But in my view, every time a student uses Gen AI as a co-writing partner to complete a fiction or non-fiction writing assignment, they are passing up a chance to develop and hone thinking and communication abilities that will never stop being the basis of professional success, effectiveness, and creativity.
There are probably many ways in which AI and Gen AI can provide scaffolding for students learning to write in which the student is still the one who is doing all of the writing. But let’s not deny learners the opportunities for growth and the independence, self-confidence, and real competence that come with the accomplishment of a difficult task without help.