The AI Paradox: How AI Could Transform Writing for the Better
Introduction: A Perilous New World
Paradox: (n.) A tenet contrary to received opinion; a statement that is seemingly contradictory or opposed to common sense and yet is perhaps true (Merriam-Webster, n.d.).
If you were to ask educators, journalists, and professional writers today what the future of writing looks like, their answer would be dystopian. It would sound something like this: There will be no human writers. It will all be AI bots communicating with each other. We will live in a world where humans do not communicate with each other. The internet will be active but devoid of human life.
Indeed, if you were to venture over to Medium or Substack, you are likely to find article after article bemoaning the rise of AI and how bots are consuming the internet and cheapening written expression in the process. Reddit has become so concerned by this that even the slightest artificial sounding phrasing is bound to get users accused of being bots and submitting “AI Slop” akin to the Salem Witch Trials of the 1600s.
While professional writers have set the internet ablaze with fears that their livelihoods might be disintegrating, educators have also expressed fears as to how AI might impact learning:
The integration of Generative AI (GenAI) in educational settings has raised significant concerns among educators regarding the potential for 'cognitive offloading,' where students may bypass the essential struggles of the learning process, ultimately undermining the development of higher-order thinking skills and authentic authorship. (Sullivan et. al., 2024)
The worry is that with AI ready and available to process data, analyze information, and even synthesize information to produce essays, presentations, and videos, students have found a highly attractive option to bypass work. Afterall, why put all the effort into critical thinking, problem solving, analyzing, and writing when there is a platform that will do it for you free of charge?
The prevailing mood is that AI has created an era fraught with the perils of plagiarism, work avoidance, and the degradation of metacognitive skills, yet paradoxically, I would argue that AI also presents a rare opportunity to deepen these very same skills while also increasing students’ capacity for critical thinking, researching, and even writing. The only way this can happen, however, is if educators and students are able to reframe AI as a useful tool and not an infallible program.
Old Fear, New Mask
For being a field committed to human growth and development, education can be surprisingly technophobic. Any time a new technology has emerged, there has been a fear of what it might cost students in the short term and society in the long term. For instance, the advent of the typewriter triggered a fear that there would be a regression in “penmanship” and would “stifle the individuality of the student's expression” (Wood & Freeman, 1932).
Many years later, Neil Postman (1985) famously described the fears that educators and society as a whole had about the effect television had on learners:
There is a pervasive concern among educators that the visual allure of television encourages a passive reception of information, which may erode the habits of disciplined study and the active mental effort traditionally associated with literacy and classroom discourse.
This was the era of TVs being called “idiot boxes” and “boob tubes,” with the most common worry being that it was causing students to be less creative, focused, and analytical. Indeed, the biggest worry was that society as a whole was going to see an end of literacy and active thinking as television would turn generations of students into passive thinkers. It should be noted that this worry was voiced about Baby Boomers, Generation X, and Millennials.
Fast forward to the mid-2000s when Wikipedia burst onto the scene. Suddenly the worry of every teacher became centered on a lack of research and reliable sources. During this time, Jaschik (2007) noted:
The academic community has expressed significant apprehension regarding Wikipedia, primarily focusing on its lack of traditional peer review and the fear that students' reliance on it will lead to a decline in information literacy and a disregard for authoritative, scholarly sources.
The common fear was that students were simply just plagiarizing from the popular online encyclopedia or at the very least stripping articles of their sources, letting the Wikipedia editors do the research and digesting of information for them. Many teachers, myself included, found themselves repeating the now infamous adage, “Wikipedia is not a primary source.”
Despite all of these fears, students are still able to express themselves through writing and have not forgotten handwriting (although there was a regression after teachers stopped explicitly teaching it in the wake of high stakes testing), the generations that grew up on television learned how to read and think creatively, and today’s college students are still able research and write their own papers. Every time a technology has caused a panic, the worst fears have failed to materialize. According to researchers, this is not a new phenomenon:
History suggests that the introduction of new media into education consistently triggers a cycle of “technopanic,” characterized by fears of cognitive decline or the loss of essential skills. However, empirical evidence shows that when these tools are integrated into pedagogy, they do not replace fundamental cognitive abilities; rather, they reconfigure them, allowing learners to offload lower-level tasks to focus on higher-order synthesis and creative expression. (Selwyn, 2014)
This pattern is remarkably consistent. Whenever a new, game-changing piece of technology enters the world, the typical outcome has been that humans adapt to the technology, and ultimately, it becomes a supplementary tool and not a replacement for human thinking.
Turning Our Students into Directors
When Marshall McCluhan famously proclaimed that the “medium is the message,” he was not simply saying that how information is presented is what the information is telling you. In the age of broadcasting, he was also writing and asserting that the new forms of information technology were not just finding a new way to present our language, it was actually redefining that language’s vocabulary (McCluhan, 1964/1994, p. 8). This trend has only intensified in the age of the internet. For instance, think of how Facebook has redefined the word “friend” or social media the word “conversation.”
What we are seeing now is that AI is redefining the word writing, paradoxically serving as a destructive force for the traditional form of writing instruction while ushering in a new kind. The skill itself is not obsolete; people continue to depend on research, facts, and the written word. How this process is done, however, is what is changing. It is the role of the educators to operate within this nexus and find a way to effectively teach this new process (all the while learning it themselves).
Having studied creative writing in college and then taught writing for secondary students for a significant portion of my career, I have seen the impact that AI has had on the writing process. While some might argue that we should collectively resist the urge to use AI in the classroom to teach writing, I would advocate for educators to take more of a nuanced approach; instead of ignoring or penalizing AI, treat it the same way that math teachers treat the use of calculators in class. Much like AI, there are some activities where calculators would not be appropriate; at the same time, calculators have proven to be highly effective instructional tools when students are engaged in more complex and cognitively rigorous activities. Furthermore, the advent of calculators has not spelled the end of students being able to solve arithmetic problems. The same can be said about AI.
To do so, educators must accept that AI is not ending writing instruction, just the old way of teaching it:
We must move from a deficit-based approach of ‘detecting’ AI to a literacy-based approach of ‘integrating’ it. AI does not spell the end of writing; it signals a new era of 'translingual' and 'transmodal' communication where the human remains the architect of the idea, while the machine assists with the scaffolding. (Eaton, 2023)
In adopting this approach, AI does not take on the role of writer, but rather helpful assistant. Students continue to serve as the primary directors of whatever is being produced and use AI for the more onerous and less cognitively rigorous ones.
From my own personal experience, I can say that using AI has been a game changer. Since launching my professional website on March 30th, I have been able to produce 11 articles, all highly researched, and produce versions for a number of different platforms, including Medium, Substack, LinkedIn, and on several professional websites as a guest columnist. This output simply would not have been possible before AI.
Before I get tarred and feathered by the very online community that I love, I want to first stress that none of the tasks I have assigned AI have been to write my articles for me. After all, what would be the point of that? I am writing out of passion for education. Rather, here is how I have used AI and how educators can with their students:
- Generate writing topics and outline ideas
- Research specific topics and identify specific quotes for support
- Summarize and paraphrase information
- Offer suggested revisions to account for voice, organization, and clarity
- Edit for conventions, syntax, and word choice
- Aid in properly citing sources
All of these tasks render AI as a thought partner; it is still the student who is the primary writer. Furthermore, much like when using calculators, students must know what they are looking for when using AI. For instance, they need to have a clear idea of what they need to write about, what information will help support their ideas, who their audience is, and what the final product needs to look like. Furthermore, they must understand what good writing is in order to ensure that their final product is authentic. Simply turning all of this over to AI would be akin to putting your car on cruise control, falling asleep, and expecting to get to your destination safely.
Moving Forward
Much like the technological achievement of yesteryear, AI has been a disruptor of the status quo. For some this makes it dangerous and scary, while for others revolutionary and exciting. Often the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Prudent educators will not get too caught up in moralizing the technology and will instead take a more instrumentalist view, treating it as a tool for learning that can be explicitly taught to students to maintain cognitive rigor while increasing efficiency.
Although technology changes society and human behavior, it does not change human beings themselves. As long as humanity is language-based, humans will need to be able to write, think critically, and problem solve creatively. AI cannot and will not be able to supplant humans in these skills. Instead, students must continue to develop these skills so that they can properly direct AI to perform the tasks assigned to it in the most efficient and effective way.
Rest assured humanity, there is still a role for us in the future; and rest assured educators, writing instruction will continue to remain an essential component of education. We just need to do what our ancestors did and evolve with the times.
References
Eaton, S. E. (2023). Academic integrity in a post-plagiarism era: Challenging the status quo. Palgrave Macmillan.
Jaschik, S. (2007). A stand against Wikipedia. Inside Higher Ed.
McLuhan, M. (1994). Understanding media: The extensions of man. MIT Press. (Original work published 1964)
Merriam-Webster. (n.d.). Paradox. In Merriam-Webster.com dictionary. Retrieved May 6, 2026, from https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/paradox
Postman, N. (1985). Amusing ourselves to death: Public discourse in the age of show business. Viking Penguin.
Selwyn, N. (2014). Distrusting educational technology: Critical questions for changing times. Routledge.
Sullivan, M., Kelly, A., & McLaughlan, P. (2024). ChatGPT in higher education: Considerations for academic integrity and student learning. Journal of Applied Learning and Teaching, 7(1), 1-15. https://doi.org/10.37074/jalt.2024.7.1.18
Wood, B. D., & Freeman, F. N. (1932). An experimental study of the educational influences of the typewriter in the elementary school classroom. Macmillan.