Text-generating artificial intelligence tools such as ChatGPT send shivers down many spines, especially the sensitive spines of writing and literature instructors.

Rosemary Haskell

“Write an essay about Hamlet’s Oedipus complex,” I ask Chat GPT and lo and behold, there’s an essay… in some shape or form. The optimist in me says, well, a student will need to edit and add to and check the sources of this text, and maybe expand on it. In fact, by the end of the process, he will actually have some understanding of the theme and the play.
But do students really have to read Shakespeare’s play? Does he really have to struggle to sift through the ingredients of the play, focus and develop the tiny germs of his ideas? The answer seems to be “no”. The student, or anyone, will not need to do any of these things.
How important is the absence of such intellectual activity? As is often the case, we can ask George Orwell to sharpen our thinking. His 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language” condemns contemporary English as full of “easy” off-the-rack phrases that writers arrive at without thinking and then “parts of a ready-made henhouse.” They work together.” No hard mental work is required. We can become like the “dummy” speaker who, from “letting ready-made phrases flow into the crowd” and reproducing them, “has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine.”
But why did Orwell fear this semi-automated method of merely producing text instead of writing a work himself? He saw it as a withdrawal of thought that resulted in the hiding of meaning—from others but also, more mischievously, from the authors and speakers themselves. Using other people’s words and phrases—already circling—reduces the labor of composition. Furthermore, Orwell argued that this thought-provoking writing promoted political “orthodoxy”—an acceptance of the status quo.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT accesses a word hoard that “already exists.” To echo Orwell, I wonder if this vast warehouse of verbal clothing that is off-the-rack rather than bespoke will limit our thinking. To use another metaphor, will AI’s script continue to tread water instead of floating us to new ideas, new ideas that are shaped in part by our idiosyncratic and perhaps less accurate ways of expressing them?
Orwell, in his 1946 essay, was preparing for the horrors that would follow his novel “1984,” where the totalitarian Big Brother suppressed rebellious thought by promoting the official language of newspeak. This language greatly reduced the vocabulary and thus, the novel argues, reduced the range of thought, especially politically unorthodox thought.
In my darkest moments, I can’t help but think of Chat GPT’s text-generating functions as Orwellian agents transporting the Internet world into my head. Of course, this kind of linguistic Pavlovianism has been happening for years: the text predictors in my email write things before I do. I’m getting more accommodating: Why not let Bill Gates write my emails for me? His Microsoft brain saves me from trouble. I think less.
As a teacher of undergraduate writing and literature, I feel like I’m on the leading edge of this new text-producing territory. Students, and perhaps all of us, have always found ways to avoid reading assigned texts. It has been made all too easy to succumb to the temptation of late teens “I don’t want to do my homework.”
Still, I try to put the AI ​​robowriter in perspective. However, the Internet did not destroy reading, writing and thinking but opened up a vast vista of easily accessible information. To begin my research, I no longer have to go to a library, thumb through drawers full of molding index cards, lift giant indexes from the shelves and painstakingly transcribe authors, titles, dates. The great electronic machine brain can do it all for me. “When I was your age, I actually had to get out of my chair and walk both ways to the library,” was a common refrain. I don’t even bother saying it anymore, those analog days are long gone.
And yet, if ChatGPT doesn’t make “Hamlet” or Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” the default option, if it keeps us and our descendants from the addictive and painful pleasures of creating our own idiosyncratic and incomplete paragraphs from scratch. Deprives, so I won’t do it. Is it worth forgiving?

Rosemary Haskell is a professor of English at Elon University in Elon.