While people who have spent years cultivating their writing skills might bemoan the arrival of AI-assisted writing, there is also a much more optimistic way to view these changes. Until now, the ability to write well was inherently elitist. People fortunate enough to have the time and financial capacity to pursue higher education were better positioned to produce excellent writing.
In the blink of an eye, that has changed. AI is enabling anyone, regardless of education level, to create well-written documents and do so in pretty much any language. It’s a profound change, and it’s also profoundly threatening to institutions such as colleges, which are collecting tuition used in part to teach traditional long-form writing skills to students who will rarely use them after they graduate.
But to lament that good writing will no longer be the exclusive province of elites is, well, elitist. A far better response is to celebrate the arrival of a technology with the promise of truly democratizing written communication.
What about hallucinations?
As documented by a growing list of newsstories, generative AI systems sometimes output false information. In fact, there is some evidencethat hallucinations are an inherent aspect of large language model (LLM) outputs. But hallucinations are an easily solvable problem.
First, anyone using AI to write can examine the resulting text and remove any assertions of fact that are not easily and reliably verifiable. The people who have ended up in hot water for inadvertently turning in documents containing AI hallucinations have failed to successfully do this checking.
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It feels like education is about to be overrun with this kind of thinking and a small number of classical schools will be the only places left where kids still read great books in full and learn to write well on their own.
