Tomorrow, Tuesday morning, will be the first day of the class I’m teaching this semester at the University of the Philippines in Diliman. I retired seven years ago, but as professor emeritus have availed myself of the option to keep teaching at least one course. I don’t have to, and sometime soon I might stop and take a proper rest, but I think it’s good for both my young students and myself to keep up what amounts to an intergenerational dialogue.
Even in UP, too many courses are being taught by instructors just a few years older than the class. That’s good for communication and relatability of thought and treatment, and sure, the alternative of being lectured by your grandfather isn’t exactly thrilling. But I feel that now, more than ever, we need to bridge what the 1960s called the ‘generation gap’ to make mutual sense of the world we’re living in, which is probably just as perplexing for me as for them.
I usually teach at the graduate level, but for the first time in years (if not the last), I’ll be handling an undergraduate class, at my department’s request. It’s a course for seniors called Creative Writing 198: Special Topics (Professional Writing), which I myself designed and first taught over 20 years ago. It’s aimed at providing English, literature and CW majors with the practical writing skills they hardly learn in school. They may know their Shakespeare and Salinger, their Defoe and Derrida, their Virginia Woolf and Virginia Moreno – but they can’t write an application letter, a news report, a feature story, a brochure, a speech, an AV script or do a proper interview.
In other words, they can’t write for a living, which is what the big, bad ‘real world’ beyond graduation expects them to do. They get all starry-eyed about writing that great sci-fi or romance novel that will bring them international fame – and yes, who’s to say it won’t ever happen – but they’ll quickly realize that you need a day job to pay for all the instant noodles and pizza (not to mention the studio, the WiFi and the commutes) that dreams are made on. So – drawing on all my years as a self-styled ‘Swiss Army Knife’ of writing – I designed CW 198, from which at least two generations of students have now emerged. I’m happy that many still write me back to say that it was one of the most useful courses they ever took. (To those who can’t study with me, you can take a look at my book, Windows on Writing, published by Vibal Press.)
I’m writing this not to advertise the course, which should be fully subscribed by now, but to share the anxieties and apprehensions that many teachers – from full professors down to the greenest instructor – are facing: how to teach writing in the age of AI. The last time I taught CW 198, AI was still something of a joke; I’d ask it to write something in the style of Nick Joaquin and it would throw up laughably pseudo-romantic garbage.
I do recall, however, saying even then that AI was bound to catch up in time. That time has come, and we’re no longer laughing. The uncanny and frankly scary speed and precision with which AI has learned to mimic human writing – yes, your writing, if you feed it with enough examples – tell us that human thinking can’t be too difficult to approximate if not exceed. (Here, bring in your favorite senator, and you’ll see how low the bar is set. And it’s hard to accuse AI of being ‘soulless’ when so many people and their productions are exactly that.)
Not surprisingly, AI in education has been met with fear and suspicion, if not outright hostility. There have been reports of professors retiring early to escape the aggravation of having to chase after AI-assisted cheaters and of having to sort out the natural from the artificial. All over the world, and all over academia, there have been movements against AI, or at least against its abuse and misuse – an aversion extended to all digital media.
Sweden leads the world in moving back from digital screens to paper in its basic education; phone bans in school are now in effect in Denmark, Finland, France and Italy, among others, as part of this ‘analog revival’ to improve reading skills. Following such models as the University of Chicago Law School, the UP College of Law will now forbid law freshmen from bringing and using their digital devices in class, to encourage critical thinking.
I agree with these moves, especially at the foundational levels of education. At the same time, let me state what I think clearly: we reject or ignore AI at our own peril. It’s not going away, it will keep getting smarter and our young people will be using it 10 years from now with neither guilt nor shame, making precise prompts with natural fluency. I’m not saying that all the ethical questions will have been swept aside by then, but the major technical challenges (yes, with ethical dimensions) like AI’s enormous water and power requirements should have been resolved, likely with AI’s own help.
That said, what am I going to do with my CW 198 class? I’ve decided that instead of banning it outright (which I suspect will be futile in any case) we’ll use AI – to see what it does and what we can do differently or better. I’ll have them do in-class writing to establish benchmarks, and then we’ll ask AI to come up with its own version. What AI says won’t be the standard by which papers will be scored, although it might be superior in some mechanical ways like grammar and spelling. We’ll see how AI shapes its arguments, against how we might approach the topic and present examples. We’ll put a premium on original thinking, on expressing individuality, focusing not so much on ‘getting it right’ as on ‘making it mine.’
I frankly don’t know how this will all work out, but at 72, I’ll be taking a privileged peek over the horizon, embarking on a grand experiment in the spirit of that poem recently recalled by ‘The Odyssey:’ to strive, to seek, to find and not to yield.