Skynet v. Writing
Have you seen this chart? https://www.educatorstechnology.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/AI-Research-Tools.pdf
Useful for some perhaps, but I think horrible too. Especially its promotion of the SciSpace app that will read documents for you and will summarise and explain concepts. That is going to be normative, very often wrong, and not open to interpretive conflicts. It destroys independent critical capacity, and - well, reading is the very reason for having texts, why outsource this pleasure to a machine?
Then the three items listed under ‘Help with Research Writing’ - at all levels this is not ‘help’ but abandonment of the task of learning to write (we all, even the most advanced, should be searching for our own words, our own expression). In the context of second language writing, the unfortunate dominance of English, each of these three writing tools destroys the task of learning to write. It enables a mad normative rush to the middle, removes at a stroke the long slow learning required for authorial style, discouraging any ability in an emergent author to discern and stretch grammar rules with flair, personality and timbre. Hurtling towards a mindless perfection, it excuses the mass production of correct but bland text and this absolutely kills enthusiasm, creativity and spontaneity in expression. Beyond proofreading, the so-called clarity of the machine has such baleful effects that the destruction has already happened once it is turned on.
I am concerned that we are betraying the opportunity that we, as students, should also be taking in learning to write - if we permit, beyond using apps for research tasks that can be mechanised - if we permit, or encourage, the use of these so-called ‘writing tools’. This is a disaster for writing since the process of learning to write in an autonomous voice within an evolving constrictive but enabling grammar (which should of course be pushed) is too easily lost. And in terms of teaching any ‘art’ of writing, this too is lost to numbers, where any teaching via ‘marking’ work is done only to correct the machine, to improve the machine’s ability to control, enhancing logarithmic orthodoxy. Writing ability is replaced by dead automated application of machine writing and, in direct consequence, thought suffers, the algorithm rules - viva dot.matrix all hail Skynet!
Perhaps, on the other hand, it is not all bad that a generation of the upwardly mobile urban elite have their education sabotaged by the imposition of normative, boxed, by-the-numbers thinking? Though this sabotage would be more encouraging if there were a strong expressive culture ready to replace it, where hitherto subordinated classes could gain a direct access to textual production without being coded in turn by these same machines, now embodied int he administrative class. How to encourage that uprising when the commodity market absorbs everything into its screwed tight squares?
