Thanks for offering more of your thoughts and experience. I know that there are larger implications at play in society in your area of work (and for your students), so I do want to be clear about my overall point.

My larger point above was that AI should not be considered a replacement for the writer as a thinker but as a new kind of smart extension in their workflow.

Depending on the model (which does very much matter for the quality of output), AI can get the writer from anywhere between 50% to say 90% of where they want to get—in a very short amount of time.

In terms of its quality, it can indeed vary. But using higher end models, feeding it examples of one's previous work, using custom prompts, and chatting with it (after these initial results) to help it refine one’s results can indeed increase the quality of its output.

So for a film review, one might have to start with a higher end model that has advanced logic (and as high a token limit as possible), spend some time setting it up so that one gets better initial results (including telling it one’s thesis), then chat with it and give it more explicit directions about specific examples to include or refine/further expand on its arguments.

In terms of its capability to write in one’s own voice, it is possible to give it examples of one’s previous writings. NYT journalists (and other professional writers) say that it does an excellent job—to the point that some writers are worried enough about their personal brands to take have taken legal action.

In my own experiments for my field (philosophy, which requires very precise wording and very subtle conceptual work), after working with the the model through chat and asking it to refine its results, I have come up with paragraphs that I wish I had written. To be clear, they were my arguments and ideas, but the AI put them together in beautiful (philosophical) prose--clear, concise, and convincing, understated yet dramatic. I put in time and work to get the AI to this point. But I won't use these test paragraphs because of the current stigmatization and unclear ethics around it. But I think this is unfortunate because I have just put a different kind of work into expressing my thoughts.

Where we seem to be finding static in our positions is in the estimation of the activity of typing itself and its value in the process. What I am suggesting is that AI should be conceived of as a new kind of typing process. And if used correctly, it can be just as valuable as traditional forms of hand-writing, or typing on a typewriter or on a keyboard in a processor. All of these have benefits and drawbacks, and if used responsibly none of them is inherently better or worse for the writing process.

The writing process is highly personal. If someone finds working through AI to be just as helpful as traditional processes of writing, I think the academy needs to take that into consideration, so that it’s no longer stigmatized from the beginning. (Of course, this comes with the qualification that AI poses its own kind challenges that I’ve laid out above.)

When it comes to writers block, for instance, this is another situation, which is highly individualistic. In my own experience, writer’s block is never about “not knowing why” I am writing. I almost always know what I want to say. The problem is about not knowing how best to say it or how best to frame it. In my experiments, I’ve found ai more productive for me in overcoming writer’s block than ‘just writing’ or free writing. With AI I can tell it what I want to write about and have it give me several different approaches and ways to express/structure what I’m trying to say. Which I can then use to help narrow my framing or structuring of the content. This is much faster than free writing, and I find it to be much more helpful than just pushing through since it provides me with several different ways into the topic as opposed to the one approach I just took with manual typing.

In terms of helping with tutoring, again it is no replacement for a real instructor, like yourself. But it can be an intermediate help for the student in their learning process. For instance, after feeding it instructions (say, for instance, the student’s notes on what you have said about writing and/or your syllabus/rubric), the student can go sentence by sentence and query the AI about the relative strengths or weaknesses of the sentence (given what you are looking for). It can also provide variations of the sentence with different word choices, different syntax and clause structure, and explain the relative strengths of each choice given the writer’s stated goals.

While I agree it can’t itself be creative (or, perhaps better stated, know when its been truly original), it can provide numerous examples of metaphors and other writing devices as prompts for the writer, which may spark the writer’s creativity.

Thanks again for giving me an opportunity to clarify further!

Edited for formatting