I find educators grappling with slop interesting. We're in phase 1 where we remind folks of the development they're missing out on. In phase 2, I'd guess we'll teach advanced techniques earlier. Like, how to use LLMs effectively for fill in the blank. That could be enough to motivate learning because you can't manage thinking if you're unable to think yourself.

AI’s prose is perfectly mediocre, producing the sort of inert gloss that reads like a Frankensteinian amalgam of MFA-workshopped writing, an unintentional parody of the style it mimics. The resultant stories and essays are simulacra of thought, generated via pattern recognition learned from millions of human-penned words, rooted in no particular experience by no particular person. AI writing reminds me of Tennyson’s description of the beautiful Maud in the titular poem:

Faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null
Dead perfection; no more

The conversation that followed their confessions was one of the most productive teaching moments of my eight years at MIT. Writing, I told them, isn’t supposed to be easy, and of course it can be tedious but that doesn’t make it rote. Writing isn’t just the production of sentences – it’s the training of endurance by way of sustained attention. It’s a way of learning what one thinks by attempting to say it. An LLM can reproduce the appearance of that activity, but it can’t replace it, because the value lies not only in the object produced but in the transformation that occurs during its making.

The danger isn’t that AI will replace writers or render the workshop obsolete. It’s that students are becoming accustomed to bypassing the friction that once revealed their process.