An MIT lecturer found that students in his writing workshop were submitting fiction generated by artificial intelligence.
Ah, I remember the good old days when submitting work that you didn’t write but claiming that you did was called plagiarism.
The lecturer confronted the class with this plagiarism. Here’s the instructive conversation that followed:
For a few moments, all was quiet except the classroom’s ticking radiators. Then, a teary-eyed confession: one of the ostensible authors said she only used AI because she was scared of looking stupid, of being criticized for bad writing. She said she loved writing stories and hated having used AI. But she couldn’t stop herself, recounting a sequence similar to an addict’s descent: at first she fed her story into AI for a grammar check, it suggested line edits and she accepted, then it asked if she wanted structural edits, then it offered to rewrite the entire piece.
The other would-be author admitted he had never written a short story before and he had an idea but didn’t know where to start. I asked him why he didn’t reach out to me for help. He shrugged.
One of the other students raised her hand, saying she didn’t understand why it was bad for AI to write stories as long as the stories are based on their ideas. More students spoke: one wanted to know how using AI was any different from using a human editor. Another wanted me to answer why, at a university that launched one of the world’s first AI research programs in 1959, were we even having this debate? Isn’t AI meant to make everyone’s life easier? Less stressful? Isn’t the point of AI to free humans from the tedium of rote tasks?
The conversation that followed their confessions was one of the most productive teaching moments of my eight years at MIT. Writing, I told them, isn’t supposed to be easy, and of course it can be tedious but that doesn’t make it rote. Writing isn’t just the production of sentences – it’s the training of endurance by way of sustained attention. It’s a way of learning what one thinks by attempting to say it. An LLM can reproduce the appearance of that activity, but it can’t replace it, because the value lies not only in the object produced but in the transformation that occurs during its making [Micah Nathan, “I Knew My Students Were Using AI. Their Confessions Led to a Powerful Teaching Moment,” The Guardian, 2026.05.10].
If you just need a pile of words fast, sure, shake ChatGPT’s Magic 8-Ball. If you’re going to share that pile of words, do your fellow humans a favor and put an honest AI label at the top, not your name.
But if you are looking to learn, grow, and genuinely communicate—i.e., build common bonds with other humans through the sharing of impressions, opinions, experiences, dreams—then submit yourself to the struggle of writing. Think about each word. Think about the tone, rhythm, and meaning that you can build from each possible combination of symbols and sentences and references to past blog posts. Craft your own story, your own argument, and then make it public, with your name rightfully at the top. You’ll make your readers and yourself richer and more human than if you parrot the words of a machine.
I write myself, with no artificial intelligence assistance, because I want to write my self. I encourage you, my fellow humans, to do the same.