AI has made traditional writing skills obsolete. Education must adapt.

Today, many students know what our education system has not yet recognized: artificial intelligence (AI) has made traditional writing skills obsolete. It is a change that I see from the first hand as a teacher of undergraduate writing lessons at the UCLA.

AI can perform most writing tasks

In recent years, educators have produced an apparently infinite series of working group reports, policy declarations, OP-ED and other forms of swivel on the role of AI in writing. But few have recognized what is abundantly obvious for almost everyone under the 25 years old– that today's young people live in a future where the vast majority of writing will be produced using AI.

Of course, there are exceptions. Novelists, journalists, writers, columnists, lawyers, academics and others in the high intensity professions of writing should always be qualified writers. For them, the AI ​​will complete and amplify – but not completely replace– Expertise in human writing.

But the vast majority of students will not choose to lead people centered on writing. They will write much more sporadically and for more utilitarian purposes. They will write stage reports, meetings of meetings, user manuals, business plans, newsletters, letters to municipal councils, motivation letters and instructions to a neighbor on how to feed the cat when absent. With only a modest amount of human supervision, AI can produce these documents quickly and effectively.

Historical context

And what about the argument that the writing process is much more than putting words on a page and the mental discipline necessary for writing not assisted in Ai has a long list of advantages?

It is a valid argument. But that will not win the day when weighing with the efficiency made possible by AI. And it echoes the analogous arguments put forward in the past with regard to other capacities that we no longer cultivate.

Consider good writing. Calligraphy, wrote HC Spencer in a book published in 1866: “PUts in full requisition all the superior powers of the mind. Under this impulse, the faculty of perception is called in a vigorous exercise, the memory is made more tenacious of its treasures, the judgment is at work to determine relations, proportions and distance; While the taste, always alive with shapes of beauty, be in nature or in art, is occupied with all these most beautiful discrimination of shade, color, outline and finish. . . . “”

These are very substantial advantages, and it is true that they are lost when we write using a keyboard or keyboard. But in balance, much more is won, which is why the last half century experienced an almost complete transformation of the pen to the strikes.

It will therefore be with AI and writing. We are currently in a limited space where it is always possible to imagine that the rewards hard won accessible by the writing work will be sufficient to keep AI at a distance. But it is an illusion that refuses each new advance in AI – and these advances seem to occur every few weeks.

The democratization of good writing

While people who have spent years cultivating their writing skills could deplore the arrival of AI assisted writing, there is also a much more optimistic way to see these changes. So far, the ability to write well was intrinsically elitist. People are fortunate to have the time and the financial capacity to continue higher education have been better placed to produce excellent writing.

In the blink of an eye, it changed. AI allows anyone, whatever the level of education, to create well -written documents and to do it in almost any language. It is a deep change, and he also threatens institutions such as colleges, which collect tuition fees used in part to teach the traditional long writing skills to students who will rarely use them after their diploma.

But lamenting that good writing will no longer be the exclusive province of the elites is, well, elitist. A much better answer is to celebrate the arrival of a technology with the promise to really democratize written communication.

What about hallucinations?

As documented by a growth list of news storiesGenerative AI systems sometimes produce false information. In fact, there is Some evidence that hallucinations are an inherent aspect of outputs as a large language model (LLM). But hallucinations are an easily solved problem.

First, anyone using AI to write can examine the resulting text and delete all the affirmations of fact that are not easily and reliably verifiable. The people who found themselves in hot water to inadvertently have documents containing AI hallucinations have failed to perform this verification.

Second, over time, I expect the Hallucinations AI to be seen a bit like a slow internet service in previous decades. Like technological progress has made the Internet in large part one thing in the past (with access to planes and still network locations still notable exceptions, although these exceptions disappear Thanks to Starlink), other progress in AI will alleviate hallucinations.

Even if the Futures LLM cannot be entirely prevented from taking out a certain degree of false information, it will be easy to add retro software to check the accuracy of all the affirmations of fact verifiable publicly. And we will not need to wait for decades before seeing AI systems which are mainly without hallucination. They should be widely available in a few years.

Adapt our education system

Today's writing programs are supervised by people with age in the pre-A era. There is a natural bias to want to teach students to prosper in the world that most educators know the best – where the ability to produce a well -written document without computer assistance has opened the door to otherwise inaccessible professional opportunities.

But this world is already moving away in the past. It is much better to rethink writing to make a complete use and without excuse for the power of AI, because this is how everyone will write. This means replacing class policies that prohibit the use of AI by writing assignments by policies promoting its responsible use. This also means teaching students that plagiarism generated by AI is always plagiarism and that AI sometimes produces hallucinations.

And this means helping students become competent in the use of AI as a force multiplier to improve the depth, versatility and speed of their writing. Among other things, this requires teaching students how to assess writing for flow, organization, clarity and logical and stylistic coherence. This will allow them to examine and refine more (often using the AI) the text produced in AI that they will use in almost all their writing. And contrary to what we could expect, a person does not need to be a good writer to assess writing – just like someone who cannot play the piano can nevertheless distinguish qualified and unskilled piano players.

For current college and secondary students, AI capabilities are no more surprising than internet access was to people who were young two decades. Asking them not to use AI to help them write does not make as much sense as telling students in 2005 not to use the Internet for research. Young people today know that when it comes to writing, the technological landscape has undergone a tectonic change, and they have already found their new place. Those of us involved in their teaching must do the same.