You have /5 articles left.
Sign up for a free account or log in.
Moor Studio/DigitalVision Vectors/Getty Images
Maybe the professionalization of creative writing as an academic discipline was always a bad idea. Do we belong in English departments? When I was a graduate student, the director of rhetoric and composition delighted in the university’s three-year M.F.A. program. Fledgling teachers in front of first-year writers was a winning combination of us winging it by throwing creativity at the wall and students appreciating our authentic advice that writing isn’t really something you learn or teach—it’s something you practice.
Until writing studies adopted generative artificial intelligence as sound pedagogy, I always felt at home among my fellow word nerds in rhet comp and literary studies. These days, I identify with the buzzkill parents of Ray Bradbury’s short story “The Veldt.” Are my students, Peter and Wendy, furrowing their brows with disapproval at my old-school AI skepticism? Will they gleefully throw me to the virtual reality lions?
Such musings tempt me to join the Gen X teaching exodus. Get out of the new road if you can’t lend your hand; isn’t that what our boomer parents sang? Perhaps creative writers are in the academy at precisely this moment for more subversive reasons than boosting enrollments for English departments. Maybe our departments can learn to welcome a more robust skepticism of the ill-fitting marriage of AI to writing studies.
If you are tired of the drumbeat of inevitability that insists English faculty adopt AI into our teaching practices, I am here to tell you that you are allowed to object. Using an understanding of human writing as a means to allow for-profit technology companies to dismantle the imaginative practice of human writing is abhorrent and unethical. Writing faculty have both the agency and the academic freedom to examine generative AI’s dishonest training origins and conclude: There is no path to ethically teach AI skills. Not only are we allowed to say no, we ought to think deeply about the why of that no.
Feeling a little sweaty about the huge energy suckage AI draws from the grid and the monopolistic maneuvers of a handful of software companies? We are allowed to object based on the values of environmental stewardship, condemnation of rogue capitalism and disdain for the mustache-twirling villainy of big tech’s global politics.
I encourage humanities professors to pay attention to generative AI controversies outside of academia. The case of Timnit Gebru, who by various accounts was fired/resigned from Google in the fallout over her co-authorship of the paper “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Large Language Models Be Too Big?” is illustrative of the censorship, not only of Black scholars, but of those who voice robust criticisms of the biases in generative AI.
Additionally, Ed Zitron sounded the economic alarms months ago, and his newsletter chronicling the potential for a massive Silicon Valley bubble burst should be required reading for academics. Strangely, higher ed abandoned its usual glacial pace for change and revved the engine to speedily install AI into writing studies like an add-on no one wanted. While many wring their hands over inaccurate, student-blaming AI-detection software (unethical in itself), Three Mile Island will reopen in order to wean Microsoft’s enfant terrible so that its milk teeth grow into the big, existential chompers it will need to power all those bots. After all, Peter and Wendy need help with their English homework. Don’t they?
So many well-meaning educators preface their AI policies with critical acknowledgments about ethics, copyright infringement, privacy concerns, deep fakes, biased information, hallucinations and more. Look, students. Here be dragons. Let’s think about these very valid objections abstractly for a brief moment of silent thoughts and prayers. Now please open your newly generated hymnal, How to Use but Not Abuse Artificial Intelligence, to the chapter titled “Faculty Embrace New Role as Handmaidens of Doom.” There is another way. To the silent, hopeless AI skeptics and Star Trek fans: resistance is not futile. We simply do not have to participate. Let Melville’s Bartleby provide the brat slogan of our license to resist: “I would prefer not to.”
Unpopular opinion: Just because large language models mimic writing does not mean that teaching students how to use them should fall to English departments. Writing is not a contentless discipline that can be junked up with every ed-tech bauble the generative AI monopoly attempts to place on an already crowded tree. AI propagandists counter: Graduates will need AI skills to fully enter the 21st-century workforce. They further claim that we are morally obligated to teach a subject so outside of our content expertise it requires the kind of professional development most universities do not have the coffers to fund. Humanities folx, can you even code? Years of corporatespeak infiltrating our Admin-Fat U of today and maybe everyone finally has their wish: Students are customers.
As a matter of customer service, please consider that many students in creative fields feel similarly trapped in Uncanny Valley’s ivory tower. They can prefer not to learn this, too. In fact, the whole lot of us good trouble-making writers and artists ought to lead an active, organized resistance. Ethics watchers: Pay attention to the PR disaster at NaNoWriMo for a glimpse of how civilian writers are resisting generative AI. One Signal has picked up Gebru’s book, The View From Somewhere, for publication in 2026. She advocates for “a technological future that serves our communities instead of one that is used for surveillance, warfare and the centralization of power by a few men in Silicon Valley through data theft, labor exploitation and environmental damage.”
Some of the most eloquent and profane voices resisting AI come from the world of science fiction. Do yourself a favor and read Ted Chiang’s beautiful opinion piece in The New Yorker titled “Why AI Isn’t Going to Make Art,” then give yourself over fully to Chuck Wendig’s hilariously persuasive, f-bomb–riddled takedown of AI on Terribleminds titled “Generative AI for Writers: An Unfolding (but Not Inevitable) Nightmare!” Here’s a reality check about those writers who are full-throated AI skeptics: Most of them are not in the academy. If you’re lucky enough to make a living as a writer, you could probably give a hang what anyone’s provost thinks about AI in the classroom. But it matters—here in this moment—more than ever. Writers, both in and out of the academy, we need your help. Your voices.
Your reasons for resisting AI need not be my own, nor do they need to be approved by a governing body—in fact, let’s not tell the assessment committee. Resist because your job is labor-intensive enough without throwing in a crash course on how to prompt engineer a cute, addictive chat bot tutor who speaks Gen Z like a favorite BookTok boyfriend. Burn down assignments easily generated by AI, because it’s fun to occasionally make a wildfire of everything you thought you knew about teaching and try something totally bananas. Research tells us that engaged, compassionate, playful, relationship-rich pedagogy works, so use that leverage as a counter to anyone accusing us AI resistors and skeptics of being stymied in the old ways and unwilling to change.
Resistance is not anti-progress, and pedagogies that challenge the status quo are often the most experiential, progressive and diverse in a world of increasingly rote, Standard English, oat milk sameness. “Burn it down” is a call to action as much as it is a plea to have some fun. The robot revolution came so quickly on the heels of the pandemic that I think a lot of us forgot that teaching can be a profoundly joyful act.
Go wild and assign actual novels to remind students why pleasure reading enhances deep reading, empathy and language skills. Bring students on board in crafting new, nonpunitive academic honesty policies that admit the truth: We’re all still figuring out the post-plagiarism robot apocalypse. Better yet, model new policies after Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics and toss the boilerplate syllabus legalese in the trash where it belongs. Stir a little creative writing pedagogy in the mix by asking students to write flash fiction, poetry and oddball micro essays in place of easily chat-produced summary responses to required readings.
Students write quality, process-driven work when we simply ask them to avoid AI, to trust their creative instincts and we turn around and offer meaningful, human feedback. Toss every fun, inspired strategy that you know works into your classroom. Maybe you hate stifling rubrics or annotated bibliographies. Resist. Think that outcomes-based assessment cannot possibly capture the magical synapses of imaginative writing? Burn. It. Down. Generative AI pushers are asking us to do the same, and it’s time to return the sentiment with rebellion born in the knowledge that this ship is going down either way.
Challenging generative AI’s influence over writing studies is not an anti-technology stance. My sci-fi–loving heart soars at the possibilities for human advancement AI can accomplish in medicine and neurotechnology. Let’s stop wasting all this energy on AI for K-12 and college writing homework and help future graduates gain the skills they need to embrace creativity, innovative thinking and artistic agency unassisted by robots.
OpenAI’s Sam Altman claims that “nobody is looking back at the past, wishing they were a lamplighter.” Wrong. Oblivious. Classist. But thanks, Sam, for unintentionally gifting the resistance with such a symbolic name: the Lamplighters. I’ll take it. Humanity does have the power to harness this technology for the betterment of all—on this I share both awe and optimism for the future. Yet such a future requires an abundance of original thinkers. Creativity is hardwired in our brains, and we cannot outsource thinking or acts of creation to a predictive robot that generates biased, bad jacket copy and deeply creepy art.
It’s time for the arts and humanities to do better and blurt out the truth: Many of us are unwilling to adopt AI into our own writing craft, nor will we push it on undergrads. What will they do if we form an active resistance to generative AI, replace us with robots before we get tenure? Kick us out of the robed regalia procession so that we can finally finish our own novels? New backup plan: Teach like the institution’s disintegrating, the grid’s going down and the oral tradition is about to make a surprising, musical theater–like comeback. Lamplighters: Tell stories and write poems. Keep tossing creativity at the wall and see what sticks. Resist AI like the discipline of creative writing still matters, like a Roomba with a rubric app couldn’t possibly teach your class. Continue to bring the funk, fun and ambrosia salad to the human party—and never say sorry that it’s nostalgically kitschy, unapologetically weird and made by your own hand.
