More and more people view that ChatGPT will ruin students’ writing, but I think ChatGPT is more like a symptom instead of a cause.
More and more people think that ChatGPT are ruining writing skills of students, but in my view, it more like the result revealed from problem instead of Long before the emergence of generic AI, the web had trained us to write according to speed, certainty and communication. AI just automates what the information flow has long wanted, that is, smooth copywriting, real-time view output, and expression without resistance at all.
Newsrooms has actually been living in this logic all these years. Dodds et al. (2023) shows how the pursuit of “clickable news” reshapes editorial priorities, and also explains “opinion power has shifted to a datafied version of the audience”. Once writing is mainly judged by clicks, the writer will soon learn this rule: complexity is risky, delicate and nuanced expression is too slow, and the loudest sentence is the easiest to win.
The system described above also reward the distortion. Vosoughi et al. (2018) found that “Falsehood diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth”. Therefore, Internet will become a paradise of some kinds of hot takes are not surprising. The really inefficient usually is hesitation, reflection, modification, and intellectual humility, the really efficient is anger, decisiveness, and the sense you want to explain the world clearly by one sentence.
Therefore, AI writing often gives people the feeling of not shock, but familiarity. What does it look like? It’s like what the Internet is talking like today: it’s smooth, neat, and expressive, but it’s often too light, too fast, and too like a standard answer.
Of course, if students directly hand in the AI-generated text as their own, they will cross the line. Snapper has long made it clear that “Plagiarism is the failure to give credit”. The deeper problem is that we have long taught writing as a kind of finished product. As long as things are fast, smooth and decent, they will be completed. Under this premise, it is almost inevitable for students to find the fastest producer.
So my opinion has always been very simple: ChatGPT did not kill writing. It is the information flow itself that really grinds, sharpens, and emptys the writing first. If we really want to make web writing better, we may have to stop first, stop worshiping efficiency so much, and start re-rewarding things that don’t look fast enough, such as hesitation, such as specificity, and expression from a real personal perspective.
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Han Tianyong 
Yinan Zhou 
Xinyue HOU