I still remember the exact moment I realized something had fundamentally broken in education.
It was a Tuesday afternoon in early 2023. I was grading papers for my freshman composition class—thirty essays on Orwell’s 1984—and something felt… off. The writing was too good. Not just competent, but eerily perfect. Sentences flowed with professional polish. Transitions were seamless. Every quote was perfectly integrated.
Then I noticed something strange: three different students used the exact same unusual phrase—“linguistic totalitarianism”—in completely different contexts. A quick Google search revealed it came from a popular AI prompt response making the rounds on certain forums.
That was the day I understood we weren’t just dealing with cheating anymore. We were witnessing the death of something much more fundamental: the slow, painful, necessary process of learning to think through writing.
The Quiet Death of Student Writing
Let’s be brutally honest—most teenagers have never particularly enjoyed writing essays. The blank page has always been intimidating. The red pen has always been feared. What’s different now isn’t the reluctance. It’s that they no longer have to push through it.
Why spend three hours wrestling with ideas when you can get an A paper in thirty seconds? Why struggle to find the right word when artificial intelligence already knows it? Why learn to structure an argument when the machine can do it better, faster, and without the emotional trauma of seeing your first draft?
I don’t blame the students. I truly don’t. If I were seventeen and discovered a magic button that made homework disappear while guaranteeing good grades, I’d press it too. The problem isn’t the kids. The problem is what we’re losing when they never have to not press that button.
Writing Was Never Just About Writing
Here’s something English teachers have known for generations but rarely say out loud: writing is the closest thing we have to a technology for thinking.
When you force a student to sit with their own thoughts long enough to turn them into coherent sentences, something magical happens. Ideas that seemed clear in their head reveal themselves as confused when written down. Arguments that felt convincing in the shower fall apart under the harsh light of actually having to explain them.
This process hurts. It’s supposed to hurt. The pain is the point.
The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter—’tis the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.
– Mark Twain (who definitely wrote this himself)
Every experienced writer knows this agony intimately. The paragraph that sounds brilliant at 2 a.m. but reads like gibberish at 9 a.m. The sentence you rewrite seventeen times before it finally sings. The realization, after hours of work, that your entire thesis was wrong and you have to start over.
AI removes all of this. Not just the labor, but the cognitive development that happens through that labor.
The Detection Arms Race (That We’re Losing)
Universities are spending millions on AI detection tools. Turnitin now has an AI detector. So do several other companies. They all work about as well as airport security theater—sometimes they catch the obvious cases, but sophisticated users (or even moderately clever ones) sail right through.
The detectors look for patterns: too-perfect grammar, unusual vocabulary distribution, lack of personal voice. But the newest generation of AI tools are specifically trained to avoid these patterns. They can write in authentic teenager-ese. They can sprinkle in deliberate typos if asked. They can mimic any writing style you feed them.
- Ask it to “write like a C student who’s trying really hard” and it will
- Ask it to “sound like you stayed up all night writing this” and it delivers
- Ask it to include specific personal anecdotes from your life and it weaves them in seamlessly
I’ve tested this myself. I took one of my own old student papers—a solid B+ effort with some awkward phrasing and developing ideas—and fed it to the latest models asking them to improve it while maintaining the original voice. The results were indistinguishable from what a talented student who’d worked hard on revisions might produce.
The detection tools flagged it as 0% AI-generated.
What Teachers Are Doing (And Why It’s Not Enough)
The solutions being tried right now are creative but ultimately inadequate:
- Going back to blue books and in-class writing
- Moving to oral examinations
- Assigning highly specific prompts that change every semester
- Requiring multiple drafts with tracked changes
- Banning laptops entirely from class
These are all smart responses. Some of them will work tolerably well. But they’re treating symptoms, not the disease.
Even if we successfully prevent cheating, we’ve still created a world where students never have to develop the skill of sustained, independent writing. Where the muscle of turning thought into language never gets exercised. Where the cognitive benefits of struggling with expression are lost forever.
And let’s be honest—most of these solutions only work in small classes at well-funded institutions. The average public high school teacher with 150 students simply cannot give individual oral exams or carefully track revision histories.
The Broader Cultural Consequences
This isn’t just about education. The effects will ripple through society for decades.
We’re already seeing early signs. Job applications written by AI. Professional emails composed by machines. Dating profiles that sound witty and charming because they were generated by something that analyzed millions of successful profiles.
In my more pessimistic moments, I imagine a future where genuine human expression becomes rare and precious. Where someone who can write with authentic voice and original thought stands out the way a virtuoso musician does today. Where the ability to craft a heartfelt letter or a compelling argument becomes a superpower.
Think about what we value in human communication: authenticity, vulnerability, the sense that someone has struggled to express something difficult or important. AI can fake all of these things convincingly, but it can’t actually feel them.
We’re training an entire generation to outsource their thinking and expression to machines. And we’re doing it at exactly the moment when those skills matter more than ever.
What Actually Works (The Solutions Nobody Wants to Hear)
The truth is that there’s no technological fix for this technological problem. The only real solutions are deeply unsexy:
- Make writing central to education again, even when it’s hard to grade
- Accept that some students will use AI and focus instead on process over product
- Teach students to use AI as a tool rather than a crutch—like a calculator for writing
- Create assignments that AI genuinely can’t do well (yet)
- Accept lower productivity in exchange for genuine learning
Most importantly, we need to be honest about what’s being lost. The struggle of writing isn’t a bug—it’s the feature. The frustration of not being able to say what you mean is where actual learning happens.
I still make my students keep reading journals. Real ones, written by hand. They hate it. They complain that their hands hurt. They ask why they can’t type. I tell them the truth: because the physical act of writing slows you down enough to actually think.
Some of them get it eventually. I see it in their faces when they realize that forcing words onto paper has forced them to clarify thoughts they didn’t know were muddy. When they discover the difference between having an opinion and being able to defend it.
These moments are becoming rarer. But they’re still possible.
The question is whether we’ll decide they’re worth preserving before it’s too late.
