Don’t let AI take this gift away from you

Back when I was an English teacher, students “cheating” on their writing assignments was one of the things we worried about. What is “cheating”? It’s getting someone other than oneself to write your paper. It’s cheating because the entire purpose of a student paper is for a student to write it.

These days, with free AI applications that can spit out an essay on any topic in seconds, I can only imagine how much more challenging it must be to prevent student cheating on papers.

The product of a student 500-word essay on the life of Jane Austen is not the essay. Nobody gives a rip what a young student has to say about her. The product of the exercise is the exercise itself.

It’s the process of writing that pointless paper: It forces the student to learn something — and then articulate it. And that second step is the more important one. It also teaches them how to write.

Writing is a pain. That’s why some students cheat. The pain is more than they’re willing to face. What they don’t realize is that they are the main victim of the cheat. If someone else — a human or an AI — writes your paper, you don’t learn much.

So is it “cheating” for you or I to use AI to write fundraising?

No. It’s not.

We aren’t students. We don’t write things that only exist to teach us. Our fundraising writing has an extrinsic purpose: to raise funds and make the world a better place.

If it does its job, who cares how it gets written?

Outsource it to a professional? Sure! That’s not cheating — it’s a very sensible way to get the work done.

Get ChatGPT to do it? Why not? As long as you get the quality you need, go ahead.

But there’s something else I hope you’ll consider: An important reason to do at least some writing tasks on your own. In the same way writing teaches students, writing teaches you.

Writing about something makes you smarter about it.

The process — the struggle — of organizing your thoughts and making your knowledge clear and compelling for other people is almost magical in its power to make you deeper, smarter, and more competent about your knowledge.

Author E.M. Forster said, “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?”

The hard work of thinking, writing, and polishing is what takes you to a higher level. It’s like the way exercise makes your muscles and bodily functions stronger.

And there’s no shortcut. You have to do the writing to get the benefit.

No pain, no gain.

Recent studies back me up on this. How frequent AI usage is leading to cognitive decline reports on a study that found:

…the more users trusted AI-generated outputs, the less cognitive effort they applied…. [C]onfidence in AI correlates with diminished analytical engagement and cognitive decline. This is the automation paradox — offloading cognitive tasks to AI can make humans worse at them. Participants who blindly accepted AI’s suggestions reported weaker critical thinking skills, while skeptics remained more analytical.

So when you outsource writing to AI, you may save time and money … but you won’t get the knowledge-boost that writing it yourself would have given you.

It’s a tradeoff you could find worthwhile. But you should consider that it’s a very real tradeoff.