Is writing obsolete?

I'm a College Professor. Writing Isn’t as Important as We Think, writes Joe Cruz, chair of the philosophy department at Williams College in a New York Times commentary. It's not true that writing develops thinking skills, he agues. Cruz envisions universities in which"ideas are expressed in real time and analytical thought unfolds as a debate or an oral defense or a group discussion."

That favors the glib, but not the thoughtful.

He lets his seminar students use AI to write their final essays within “specific guidelines” then talks to them about their papers, reporting that "at least half of the class was more agile, more reflective and clearer during oral exams than they were in their papers."

Writing is good, responds Matt Taibbi on Racket News. Letting students bounce ideas off a chatbot isn't thinking. It's "like calling an erotic chat with a bot a form of sex."

Cruz "goes far beyond saying A.I. can be a useful tool," writes Taibbi. He questions whether we should teach writing at all. "He reduces it to a technical process, useful for 'cognitive scaffolding' and organizing, but not for learning, which takes place through 'speaking, answering, and defending our ideas'.

"Dialogue with an A.I. can trick impressionable minds into thinking they’ve arrived, on their own, at ideas that in fact have been advanced by a monstrous, invisible consensus-making machine," Taibbi concludes. "Ironically, learning to write well, which only takes place after a person learns to read well, is the best protection young people can get from being deceived in this way."

I can't help thinking that Cruz wants to devalue writing because it's difficult. Oral exams relieve instructors of the need to police cheating on essays. But they're wildly impractical for teachers who teach anything larger than a seminar.

Writing is mentally taxing, writes Dana Goldstein in the New York Times. "Writing well requires a command of vocabulary, spelling and grammar. It forces writers to comprehend a subject, to sift through their working memory of that topic, to organize and plan."

It's no wonder that "somewhere between two-thirds and 90 percent of high school and college students are already using A.I. for schoolwork," surveys show. Many use it to help with writing assignments.

But if writing is easy -- because the chatbot is doing all the heavy lifting -- students don't develop "metacognition — the ability to think about our thinking, weigh alternate viewpoints and revise for clarity and style," writes Goldstein.

“Writing is a technology for thinking,” cognitive scientist Ronald T. Kellogg says.

Frequent AI use can "degrade critical thinking," according to a growing body of research, she writes. A small MIT study found people "who wrote in partnership with AI chatbots recorded lower brain activity while they wrote, compared with those who worked without chatbots." Furthermore, AI-assisted writers "struggled to remember what, exactly, they had written, and felt little ownership over their work."