University of Kwazulu-Natal

Opinion Ai Writing Is Not The Answer The Pitt News

Bonisiwe Shabane
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opinion ai writing is not the answer the pitt news

Get Pitt and Oakland news in your inbox every weekday. Over the summer I had many interesting conversations with the people about my majors — public and professional writing and political science. As a writing major I get asked a lot about my feelings on artificial intelligence and if I am afraid that my degree will soon become obsolete. Commonly, my answer is no. This is because technology still struggles, especially with grammar. Also, the technology needs writing that it can learn from.

One day, a man made an interesting point. He said that fiction created by artificial intelligence wasn’t uncreative because all writers just copy what came before them. There are no new plot ideas anymore and everything is just a retelling of what came before it. This is such a negative look on creativity and one I do not agree with. Saying that human creativity is the same as a writing AI is incorrect. I know that artificial intelligence will get better and I can’t judge it for the bad writing it produces right now.

What is important is to appreciate the process that creates good writing. Get Pitt and Oakland news in your inbox every weekday. During the current rise of artificial intelligence, we continue to witness its rapid growth in skill and capability. However, as AI becomes more prominent, traditional forms of writing — especially creative and academic writing — seem to be disappearing. Many college students today turn to AI to complete their writing assignments, relying on it as more than just an editing tool. As someone who values creativity and the art of writing, I find this troubling.

AI can easily generate essays, poems and even creative stories in seconds, but that convenience comes at a cost — it can increase laziness. When students depend on AI to write their papers, they miss the opportunity to develop their own voices, ideas and craftsmanship. Writing is not just about putting words on a page — it’s about expressing thoughts and emotion. As someone who loves having a prominent voice and reading other pieces with a prominent voice, it feels kind of diminishing. I believe ChatGPT and similar tools should include certain limitations to prevent users from relying too heavily on AI to do all the work for them. Using AI as a tool for brainstorming or to clarify something is perfectly fine.

However, using it to write an entire assignment defeats the purpose of learning. For example, if someone asks AI to write their assignment — maybe a three-page paper on the color yellow — they’re not developing their skills. This dependence on AI can prevent people from learning how to write effectively — a skill that remains essential no matter your field. Even outside the classroom, writing plays an important role in communication. Whether it’s crafting an email, writing a cover letter or sending a text message, the ability to write well is crucial. I’ve heard of students using AI to write emails to their professors — something that not only ruins the student’s authenticity but also weakens everyday communication skills.

Get Pitt and Oakland news in your inbox every weekday. Get Pitt and Oakland news in your inbox every weekday. Artwork generated by artificial intelligence is gradually getting better — far better than I would have expected since DALLE-2 swept the nation in 2022 with its iconic failure to generate the correct number of... The technology has gotten so good that companies are now willing to air AI-generated advertisements on national television. These ads vary in quality. Honda has since delisted their 2025 “Happy Honda Days — Rugged” commercial, which featured nauseatingly distorted AI-generated backgrounds akin to an LSD trip simulation.

Coca-Cola’s holiday commercial, on the other hand, could possibly fool your parents or grandparents into thinking it was filmed and edited professionally. Soon, possibly in only another few years, AI-generated art and video may be almost completely indistinguishable from the real thing without an explicit indication. In 2022, I loved dogging on AI’s terrible quality more than anything, making fun of its mangled hands and dead expressions, but these reliable errors are starting to become less common. Though a lot of AI artwork is still quite easy to pick out and bite my thumb at, it seems this critique that AI’s technical quality will always fall short of the real thing... When the day comes that even the staunchest AI critics can’t immediately distinguish a generated piece from a real one, it will be important to remember the real reason that artificial intelligence still deserves... That is, AI-generated artwork fundamentally lacks meaning compared to art made by humans.

Get Pitt and Oakland news in your inbox every weekday. A ChatGPT prompt is shown on a device near a public school in Brooklyn, New York, on Jan. 5. By The Pitt News Editorial Board January 17, 2023 With the recent influx of artificial intelligence programs that can create art, write essays and help write code, some students have started to use AI to help them with schoolwork. And professors have picked up on the trend as well.

Some syllabi have begun to dissuade students from using AI with their schoolwork because it is like plagiarism, which is typically when someone copies work from the internet or another person. Having a robot help write a paper or create a project leads to a gray area of whether or not using AI counts as plagiarism. While AI can be a tool to help students jumpstart the creative process, it should remain a tool and not a crutch. Relying solely on these kinds of programs to do your coursework can cheat students out of a good education. Many of these programs can help brainstorm ideas, so a user can input an idea and have AI help generate where to go next. Sometimes it helps to have something to bounce your ideas off of, particularly in fields such as creative writing or advertising.

However, using AI becomes a problem when you rely solely on the ideas and work a computer creates. Photo illustration by Liz Zonarich/Harvard Staff Experts weigh in on whether tech poses threat to critical thinking, pointing to cautionary tales in use of other cognitive labor tools A recent MIT Media Lab study reported that “excessive reliance on AI-driven solutions” may contribute” to “cognitive atrophy” and shrinking of critical thinking abilities. The study is small and is not peer-reviewed, and yet it delivers a warning that even artificial intelligence assistants are willing to acknowledge. When we asked ChatGPT whether AI can make us dumber or smarter, it answered, “It depends on how we engage with it: as a crutch or a tool for growth.”

The Gazette spoke with faculty across a range of disciplines, including a research scientist in education, a philosopher, and the director of the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning, to discuss critical thinking... We asked them about the ways in which AI can foster or hinder critical thinking, and whether overreliance on the technology can dull our minds. The interviews have been edited for length and clarity. Veasey Conway/Harvard Staff Photographer Generative AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, are emergent technologies impacting writing pedagogy in immediate, practical, and theoretical ways. Annette Vee, Associate Professor of English at Pitt, argues for the value of developing critical AI literacy in classroom spaces.

She defines critical AI literacy as “the ability to understand, apply, and assess AI operations, uses, and outputs.” At the Writing Center, we encourage discussions about critical AI literacy and its impact on writing... As we support writers at Pitt as they navigate this new terrain, we have established the following policy to help guide our practice. At Pitt's Writing Center, we prioritize: The Writing Center values working with writers as they develop and refine metacognitive writing strategies and skills, like brainstorming, generating topics and ideas, formulating approaches, outlining, drafting, reflecting on their writing process, critiquing and... We value the generative properties of human writers in these processes and remain hesitant about employing Generative AI in these metacognitive processes. Consultants at the Writing Center recognize different students may rely on different tools, strategies, and approaches to writing tasks, including the use of technological tools.

Writing Center consultants aim to provide a space that accommodates and values these adaptive learning and writing strategies. There is growing evidence that our reliance on generative AI tools is reducing our ability to think clearly and critically, but it doesn’t have to be that way Socrates wasn’t the greatest fan of the written word. Famous for leaving no texts to posterity, the great philosopher is said to have believed that a reliance on writing destroys the memory and weakens the mind. Some 2400 years later, Socrates’s fears seem misplaced – particularly in light of evidence that writing things down improves memory formation. But his broader mistrust of cognitive technologies lives on.

A growing number of psychologists, neuroscientists and philosophers worry that ChatGPT and similar generative AI tools will chip away at our powers of information recall and blunt our capacity for clear reasoning. How to avoid being fooled by AI-generated misinformation What’s more, while Socrates relied on clever rhetoric to make his argument, these researchers are grounding theirs in empirical data. Their studies have uncovered evidence that even trained professionals disengage their critical thinking skills when using generative AI, and revealed that an over-reliance on these AI tools during the learning process reduces brain connectivity... Little wonder, then, that when I asked Google’s Gemini chatbot whether AI tools are turning our brains to jelly and our memories to sieves, it admitted they might be. At least, I think it did: I can’t quite remember now.

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