Don’t waste Artificial Intelligence on writing | Opinion

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I wish I could use artificial intelligence (AI) for practical things: have it reorganize my closet or clean the stubborn ingrained dirt from my old wooden staircase. I’d love to see it remove brain tumours without ever touching a patient’s skull and detox our oceans. With our ever-growing list of needs, AI has a bright future — except in writing.

That’s right. Party’s over, folks.

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The amount of time, energy and money poured into generative AI as a writing tool is flabbergasting. Why invest resources to remove the human ability to think and write? The reason, it seems, is to have AI work alongside humans to make us more productive: malarkey to indicate humans should work as fast as the bots by their side. Writing is a great skill requiring daily practice to be good and effective. It’s not like riding a bike. While nothing can be done about ChatGPT and the like, at the very least employers should stop imposing brain-depleting tools on their workers.

Things don’t fare better in higher education. Recently, I was listening to a podcast in which an economics major at the University of Toronto was interviewed on his use of ChatGPT as a study aid. According to the student, assigned textbooks don’t do a good enough job of clearly explaining concepts. So he asks the bot to spell them out to him as if he were a 15-year-old. When asked how often he did this, he replied every time he opens his books to study.

These university textbooks are written at level. In other words, the language used is meant to match the student’s linguistic and academic abilities. I did not major in economics, but I did take a couple of first-year classes in macro and microeconomics. Indeed, the subject matter was, at times, tricky to grasp, but language was never a problem. If we had questions, we asked our professors. Of course, this was before the widespread use of email.

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We would wait in line outside our professors’ offices in the hopes they’d be able to receive us before the end of their office hours. We gained a lot from those exchanges. Mainly, we developed the confidence to approach a highly educated person, sometimes even an expert in their field, and take in their explanations. This served as a fundamental learning block, particularly by training us to interact with and seek out knowledge from those best qualified.

Why then, are we giving our youth the opportunity to descend into a life of intellectual laziness and regression?

Last year, Ontario unveiled a plan to boost literacy and math skills. Appropriately calling it a back-to-basics program, the province is investing upwards of $100 million to help its students read and write better. Grateful, but how did we sink so low?

Technology can be one big reason. Overall literacy rates in Canada are dwindling and Canadians themselves are taking notice and want change. According to a recent study by Pollara Strategic Insights, “nine-in-ten Canadians believe improving literacy rates would improve Canadians’ standard of living (92%) and contribute to a more prosperous society (93%).”

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The ability to not only read and write but also to process, analyze and synthesize information is being downgraded. This is major.

I may not write as well as my favourite 19th- and 20th-century novelists, but I am intent on trying. Funny, they were able to write marvellously well then — unassisted. Everyone should be given the chance to use their minds to create engaging copy or prose either for themselves or for the businesses they help flourish. Let’s not lose this.

Surely, AI has bigger fish to fry.

Fatima Rizzo is a Montreal-based writer and founder of Blossom Street Journal.

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