This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here.
ChatGPT and food-delivery droids came to my campus at roughly the same time, in the 2022–23 academic year. My response—cranky, tweedy—was hopelessly on brand for a history professor. The chatbot and the droid appeared to be in league, robotic species on the vanguard of civilizational collapse. Both were premised on the idea of frictionless ease, liberating their users from outmoded toils. Because you couldn’t kick the chatbot, I had to resist the urge to kick the droids. I felt new and sudden sympathy with those English weavers who tried to smash the machines.
I’d like to think that my grievance was rooted in something beyond my own impending irrelevance. The product of too many years of humanities education, I wanted to defend the foundational exercise of writing. Going back to the late 19th century, writing instruction in the humanities has been premised on the idea of writing as both a craft and an art: a practical skill that could be taught and refined, and a creative practice through which sustained effort yielded insight. The formula went something like this: We read things, we had conversations about them to unravel their many levels, then we went and wrote. In that final part of the cycle—the writing part—were torments, perhaps even tortures, but good things happened. We became thinking people, mingling with complex ideas and perhaps coming up with some of our own. The advent of the chatbot raised an unsettling question: What if writing didn’t have to be hard? What if that noble ordeal was no more necessary than going to a well to fetch your water when you could just turn on a tap?
Combing through the archives of The Atlantic, one might reasonably conclude that both writing instruction and civilization have been in peril since roughly 1890. In 1893, James Jay Greenough argued that young minds had become impoverished by too many slang words to form anything but “narrow” ideas. By November of 1959, when the magazine had a special section on “The Teaching of Reading and Writing,” excessive emphasis on standardized testing had pushed writing instruction to the side—just at the moment when young people’s minds were becoming addled by modern media and the popularity of “illiterate expressions.”
Easy as it is to mock the melodrama of such pronouncements, I can understand them. Underlying the different diagnoses and prescriptions is the basic idea that animated my own efforts as a professor: that learning to write was vital to the formation of a mind. As Henry Chauncey put it in the magazine in 1959, the “art of written communication” was “clear thinking clearly expressed.” Something essential was happening in the hard work of trying to make your thoughts comprehensible to another human being (even if that human being was just your teacher). The sparks thrown off in the process could become the energy for better thoughts—for more complex and perhaps even original ideas.
The trouble was that thinking the thoughts, finding the words, and getting them down on the page could involve considerable discomfort. Writing in the magazine in 1912, soon after graduating from college, Randolph Bourne described the “hopeless labor of writing.” “One must struggle constantly,” Bourne lamented, “to warm again the thoughts that are cold or have been utterly consumed.”
Students didn’t turn to chatbots to warm their cold and consumed thoughts all at once, but the advent of AI tools sparked a disorienting reckoning for those of us reading their papers. At first, some of the work coming in was just a little weird. Certain papers appeared as Frankenstein monsters of machine-made and human text, some of it eloquent yet empty, some of it strained and meandering in familiar ways.
But in the years to come, with updated models and the fuller integration of AI into people’s lives, I noticed a general smoothing out of student writing. The hard edges and rough parts were getting sanded down, and the arguments and ideas were more uniform. It was less common to see the kinds of errors I’d hoped to preempt on the guide to writing and history I gave the students. They didn’t refer to works of historical scholarship as “novels” much anymore, but they also didn’t find their way into some beautiful, odd idea in a convoluted sentence buried in the second paragraph on page 4.
By the end of last year, I had dusted off blue books for the first time in years and had the students sit for an in-class essay. Reading their tortured handwriting was a small price to pay to see their thoughts anew—messy, but alive.
