There have been many times over the last few years that I’ve heard someone say something along the lines of, “Well, AI is here to stay so we might as well accept it.” I can understand the perspective — Artificial Intelligence (AI) is now integrated into every app, social media platform, and search engine we use regularly. However, as a writer and a writing major, I’ve been resistant to using AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, and have been saddened by how quickly they’ve turned into a writing tool. When I hear people say that we have to just accept it now, I can’t help but wonder why?
The acceptance.
The use of AI has been quite widespread, as the Digital Education Council (DEC) conducted a global survey and found that 86% of university students use AI in their studies, with 54% using it daily. It turns out that even some fiction authors use AI in their writing, with BookBub finding that about 45% of authors are using AI in some way.
It is true that AI offers so much to the individual, as it can take on the tasks that pile up to make the work day endless. The DEC found that university students are using AI to do homework tasks like summarizing documents, explaining complex concepts, checking grammar, and even creating first drafts of essays. The authors using AI are prompting it to help them with research, outlining and plotting stories, and editing written drafts.
Using AI for these smaller, more mundane tasks allows you to be more productive while also giving you more time to do other things. As a university student, one can have so much on their plate, that of course they would want to offload some of it to an AI chatbot that will do it for them. An anonymous writer explained in a survey that AI is “Taking the ‘grind’ out of research. Fitting work into the hours I’m actually getting paid for.”
Now hold on. Does this writer suggest that they are not paid for the amount of work they have to do? Well… yes, actually. The productivity-pay gap has been widening for decades, meaning that everyone has generally been doing more work, but the pay isn’t following. As productivity grew with machinery in the industrial revolution, workers were forced to live up to an unfair standard while their pay silently lagged behind.
Our society has been trained for AI since then — we need to do more work to get paid enough to live, but that standard of “more work” is one that can only be reached by using AI. So now we accept that we must use AI to feel productive enough, while we continue tolerating our low wages.
Everybody wins, right? We don’t have to spend so much time on small tasks, and companies can still get away with paying us as little as possible. But we aren’t winning — we’ve forgotten that our bodies and our brains were not built for this level of work, even if we were getting paid adequately. Welcoming AI into our daily lives may seem helpful, but there is so much that we are losing in the transaction.
The reality check.
Our society has been swept up in work and progress for so long that we have finally defined the relationship. Toxic productivity is a manufactured sense of urgency to get things done as fast as possible, to do as much as possible with the time that one has. If one doesn’t reach this high expectation, they feel shame and guilt for not being good enough. This cycle can turn into insomnia, anxiety, and depression.
Getting caught up in these racing thoughts can make the human brain work too fast, and while it is programmed to do some quick thinking, allowing it to process more slowly is necessary. We need to slow down our thinking in order to reflect and regulate our emotions, creating an opportunity for reasoning. Shoving some of our work at AI seems like it would help us slow down in the moment, but realistically, we should be able to handle all of our own work while also doing it slowly and thoughtfully. However, as the productivity standard continues to rise with AI and nothing is being done about working conditions, people are desperate for anything to ease their burdens.
While it can be quite difficult to make time to do all of your tasks, allowing your brain to work through them is actually beneficial. A study done by MIT went viral for its findings about AI-use and the human brain, and for good reason. The results showed that using an LLM to write an essay doesn’t produce as strong of brain connectivity as writing the essay yourself. This isn’t to say that those who use LLMs aren’t as smart as those who don’t, but their brain isn’t working as hard. The long-term effects of using AI to help you write will certainly be damaging.
Aside from how this all may impact our physical bodies, there are writers who don’t prompt an LLM to write an entire essay or novel for them, simply using it as a tool for editing or getting feedback. This may help these individuals a lot, making the revision process quicker, but it removes the need for other people. Writers have long gravitated toward communities to support each other in their endeavors, and this often includes reading projects and giving feedback. In fact, the idea of “being a good literary citizen” means to review others’ work like you want others to do for you. If a writer is giving this role to an AI chatbot, the need for such community is lost.
Outside of writing communities, there are still writers struggling through the review process, and they hand it off to AI because they don’t know of any other writing resources. It seems those writers do not know about writing centers, where people are literally employed to support them in the writing process. The Writing Center at Michigan State University is centered around ideas of community, care, transformation, equity, and connection, all of which the world could use a little more of. They offer appointments for anyone in the university, or in the greater Lansing community, to spend an hour working with a consultant on their writing project.
I currently work as a consultant at the Writing Center at MSU, and every person who works there is dedicated to creating a space that is understanding of humans and their multifaceted identities, while also working to train the creative muscle in the process. Consultants don’t do the writing for you, they do better: they show you how to work through the process yourself, encouraging you to be confident in your unique voice. This work, this opportunity for learning, and this community may be lost if university writers continue allowing AI to be their consultants.
As our world becomes increasingly more digital, it becomes increasingly more isolated. We need community to help one another, to learn things we otherwise wouldn’t. We need community to remember that we are human, and to remember where life is.
Shifting reality.
AI is here, AI is everywhere, so should we just accept it? I don’t think so. I don’t think we should accept any of these issues that force us to need AI — because we don’t. Our brains are capable of doing so many amazing things, but they also need to be taken care of. We cannot possibly keep up with this expectation of productivity while being overworked and underpaid. We cannot live a sustainable life like this.
With that, we need to be healthy and happy humans. We deserve it, and it can be done without AI. There need to be regulations in place that realistically limit the amount of work one is expected to do, so we can slow down and do our work well. There need to be regulations that ensure workers are paid enough to live and thrive, not just scrape by. There need to be regulations that limit what AI can be used for, so we can return to using our brains and turning to one another for help.
At the moment, all of this sounds like a dream, but I’ll choose to believe we can get there. We can be powerful if we come together and demand change. It may take many voices, and many months or even years, but I believe that we deserve change and deserve to remember what makes us all human.