AI writing is improving — but it can’t replace the process that makes writing human
OpenAI’s short story “A Machine-Shaped Hand” is good. After being given the touchstone prompts “short story,” “metafiction” and “grief,” it produced not just a compelling and polished story but a touching examination of a subhuman existence that will never know grief. But, while the story movingly depicts the perplexities of its stunted experience, there is still something sorely lacking: a stake.
There is no blood to the words, no pulse and no writer tugging their hair out staring at a blank page. OpenAI did not have to toil or consider why it was writing what it was — it simply produced. However excellent, there is no replacement for human investment in writing, the laborious, creative process where thought transforms into words. Perhaps counterintuitively, within a future that will surely contain more advanced and technically brilliant AI writing, the human ability to engage in this process will only become more valuable. In the meantime, universities should take measures to ensure they are developing writers, not glorified prompt-makers.
It would be naïve to assume that the AI models we’re dealing with now have evolved to their fullest capacity. It is commonplace to use AI to write emails, proposals, essays and marketing copy, and models have just begun verging into the creative writing realm. This has left more than a few writers squeamish. If AI can research, draft, edit and creatively write in a matter of minutes, then why employ a person to do the same thing?
Michael Dowding, master lecturer at Boston University’s College of Communication and the founder of Wordscape Communications, a freelance-writing consultancy business, admits, “My freelance work has fallen off quite a bit.” With AI writing models, “you can get it for one-thousandth of the cost and one-thousandth of the time, and it’s probably 70%-80% of what you need,” says Dowding. “That’s a pretty compelling value proposition for most people.”
Still, generative AI can’t work without human management. “I tend to think of the models as extremely brilliant but somewhat naïve interns,” says John Wihbey, director of the AI-Media Strategies Lab at Northeastern University and associate professor of media innovation. “If put in the proper position, they’re extremely effective writers… Increasingly, we can feed them large amounts of our own writing and they can follow those patterns to mimic our voices, style and tone.”
It’s no surprise then that AI has posed a large threat to human interns. According to research from Stanford economists, entry-level employment rates across disciplines in the most AI-exposed occupations, from software engineering to customer service, declined by about 20% between late 2022 and July 2025. Many educated young people, who are paying to learn how to write effectively, communicate and graduate into the workforce, must now contend with artificial competition — and it’s hard to compete with free.
Many industries, particularly creative ones, are pushing back. In 2023, a writer’s strike in Hollywood advocated for guardrails to protect their jobs and artistic integrity in the face of such a threat. The same year, renowned writers including George R.R. Martin and John Grisham sued OpenAI for illegally using their copyrighted work, alleging “systematic theft on a mass scale.”
Algorithms scrape the internet, and in the process plagiarize the work of human writers and regurgitate a product — sometimes even a “good” product. “By looking at billions and trillions of examples, it can make a very very precise guess at what the next word in a sequence would be, and therefore produce what looks very much like human language in exceptionally short periods of time,” says Wihbey. “It looks like magic, but in fact it’s a giant multiplication problem.”
But it’s getting increasingly difficult to tell the difference. Educators must review writing outlined, assisted, edited or even entirely constructed by AI every day. Most of it is “B” material, according to Dowding. “If I ever see in a student piece the word ‘moreover,’ you’re flagged,” he said. Flat robotic language and excessive em dashes are also indicators, but with each update, the tell-tale signs are fading fast. “If it’s a baseball game,” he says, “we’re in the second inning.”
OpenAI is certainly no Shakespeare, but it has only just begun to develop. While AI writing sharpens, scrapes and improves, students — and professionals — are letting writing muscles atrophy. At the ripe age of 20, I often feel dinosaur-ish struggling against the daunting blankness of a Word document, when it seems everyone else has a head start.
According to a global survey by the Digital Education Council, 86% of college students use AI in their studies. Students, who are in their most critical, receptive lifestages, are undercutting the writing process in favor of convenience. Many are even leaning on AI to perform the entire writing process, from studs to polished products.
“Is writing going to become some artisan craft?” Dowding asks. “I’m going to be this old woodworker with his tools, building tables.” Whipping out a pen andpaper to write has been quaint for some time now; now the actual process of writing is becoming dated.
The temptation to take shortcuts is not only dangled in front of students, but it’s institutionally encouraged. Northeastern has invested significant funds into a providing students and faculty free access to Claude. You can hardly blame the students for biting.
Siena Lickle, a third-year health science major at Northeastern University, who used to write frequently throughout high school, says “I’ve forgotten how to write. I’m trying to relearn it now.” But it’s not exactly like riding a bike, and the longer those muscles remain unused, the harder it is to flex them again.
Emma Lapena, Lickle’s roommate, a third-year business administration and communication studies major at Northeastern, laughs in agreement. “Yeah, I still write,” she says. “But honestly I’ve got Chat open right now.” She admits that it’s crippling her brain. “I’ve almost conditioned myself to first open Chat and ask it to help me with an outline,” Lapena says. “It’s instinct now. I’ve kind of lost the first step in critical thought.” After a moment she adds, “I mean I definitely feel some guilt about that.”
Such is the double-edged sword young people must now wield — AI is shoved down our throats in educational settings then goes on to replace us in the workforce. We’re aware that our language is not only training AI to do so, but that relying on AI actively makes us dumber. Yet, not using AI tools runs the risk of being left behind.
While neither Lickle nor Lapena are interested in writing novels, tucking a feather into their caps and publishing soliloquies, writing is still vital, particularly pertinent in the process of obtaining a degree in communication. Regardless, writing offers the ability to express oneself — at its core, it’s thinking. And unlike wood-working or papier-mâché, thinking should not be considered a quirky hobby.
Karl Kirchwey, professor of English and creative writing at Boston University, notes rising writing deficiencies with alarm. “AI is shortchanging the student. Learning has never been a comfortable and easy process. It’s labor, there’s no way around it,” he says. “If your entire goal is grades, then you miss something profound — and hard.”
Taking it old-school, or ditching ChatGPT, might seem archaic for the sake of archaism, like performatively displaying a typewriter in an office space. The rest of the world will still be plugging in prompts and chugging along. Sure, Kirchwey, who remembers a similar panic after the launch of the internet, and takes pride in putting pen to paper, is not an AI native. Then again, neither is Gen Z.
ChatGPT was launched in 2022, meaning that Gen Z had an effectively AI-free childhood. We remember blue books, turning in handwritten assignments and writing unaided for many formative years before the big AI bang. But, even though many members of Gen Z only encountered these tools in college, we’re already seeing drastic declines in literacy rates and critical thinking abilities.
So what will become of the true AI-native generations — Gen Alpha, and the generations that follow? The problems we’re encountering now will only steepen. Before young minds are permanently oatmeal-mush-ified, learning institutions need to decide if they want to provide a well-rounded education or allow students to graduate by simply checking the boxes.
“We have to rethink what homework is going to be,” Dowding says. “Most of us are acutely aware that when we assign a paper to somebody and send them on their way for a week, the odds are very good that the work is going to be artificially assisted.” To combat the “zombification” process brought on by AI dependence, Dowding has students write in a blue book to benchmark their writing during week one. He also is trying to get BU to invest in a locked browser and advocates for a variety of in-class and home assignments.
But, ultimately, Dowding is still subject to institutional decision-making. At a nation-wide level, universities are implementing a “critical embrace” of AI — BU introduced “TerrierGPT” and Northeastern has partnered with Anthropic. “I think it’s a tremendous mistake,” Dowding admits. “BU wants to be the cool mom. ‘Yeah, come on, we don’t care about curfews and bedtime!’ I can see Amy Poehler as an instructor here. But we’re not supposed to be the cool mom. Let’s not be popular, let’s be instructive.”
What we’re losing is not necessarily good writing, but the development of good writers. This is not just reckless; it has institutionally watered down writing education and shortchanged students. Still, there is an innate human desire to learn and develop our minds — even if those willing to reject AI in the name of this desire are few and far between. While throngs of adolescents and 20-somethings enter the world without the tools to write themselves, the ability to sit down and write will only increase in value.
“You can throw a rock and hit a lot of writers who would say they don’t know what they think until they write it,” says Andrea Cohen, poet and professor of poetry at Boston University. And no — prompting a chat-box doesn’t have the same effect. “Throughwriting, a person enters into a relationship with their subconscious, an amalgamation of what else they have read, memories, and all the messiness of experience,” she says. “It’s very personal, different from what AI writes.”
It’s true that there are uncanny similarities between the human writing process and that of artificial intelligence. AI “hallucinating” implies the existence of imagination. When AI scrapes the internet and spits out writing, it convincingly emulates critical thought. After all, humans have been known to plagiarize too.
“It’s a cliche that we borrow, that we steal, that we repurpose. There are only so many themes that we write about,” Cohen says. “How do we make it fresh? That’s the trick.” Spoiler alert: the trick isn’t easy. Humans don’t have the ability to drudge through the internet thicket and render unique outputs in a matter of seconds. That’s what makes writing so rewarding — and inimitable.
A future in which human writing is obsolete is a future in which vital communication and expression of thought have been sacrificed. It’s also a future that can never be fully realized. Despite these real existential fears, there is no world in which humans altogether abandon our ability to write, something we have been compelled to do since the Stone Age.
Kirchwey describes the impulse to write as a uniquely human one, precisely because of our limitations. “Art arose from the human need to come to terms with life,” he says. “That’s the entire point. It’s not about the grade, it’s about who you are as a person.”
Humans never wrote because it was efficient. In fact, the writing process is vital because it is inefficient — as is close-reading, deep thinking and self-discovery. Amid pitiful job markets, dwindling opportunities for even deeply educated people and a severe, systemic lack of critical thought, being a good writer might very well set you apart. Anyone can plug and chug. Not everyone can offer an original idea — or articulate it convincingly.
Now is not the time for universities and educators to abandon rigor in favor of machine assistance. There is simply no substitute for the process of writing not even by the ease of AI regurgitations that are seamless, shiny and, in fact, very good.
