I have been teaching fiction writing at MIT since 2017. Many of my students last wrote fiction in middle school, and very few have experienced a proper workshop, so at the start of every semester I offer these directions for writer and reader alike:<\/p>\n
\ndouble quotation markRead the story at least twice. Mark what works and what doesn\u2019t \u2013 underline great sentences, flag clunky syntax, gaps in logic and unrealistic dialogue. Ask yourself: does the story work? Why or why not? What could improve it? Answer in a signed letter to the author, attached to their story. Give your honest opinions. Remember that an effective peer review demands close reading of the text accompanied by a boldness of spirit.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
As the directions foreshadow, most of the time we\u2019re discussing why we didn\u2019t like the story being workshopped, because writing a good story is immensely difficult even under the best conditions, especially for Stem-centric undergrads who thrive within a structure of quantitative problems and solutions \u2013 systems where there\u2019s a right answer and a clean method for arriving at it.<\/p>\n
Fiction writing isn\u2019t quantitative. Good writing feels good to read; bad writing feels bad. An effective workshop is a paradox: students must provide textual evidence to support the qualitative as if it were the quantitative. This is a terrifying prospect for the habitually superb student, to sit in stony silence while their classmates and professor slash at their work. The act of confronting that terror is, itself, an education for the writer, because writing is both vehicle and vessel for thinking \u2013 abstract made concrete, feelings translated into words. This is what many writers talk about when they refer to good prose as not just poetic expression, but communication. Thus, when we criticize a writer\u2019s work, not only are we criticizing their aesthetic choices, we\u2019re also criticizing \u2013 and here\u2019s where it can get personal \u2013 the writer\u2019s feelings and their ability to communicate them.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a lot for the ego to absorb. Prior to a few years ago, the only way a fiction writer could protect their ego was to either pay someone else to write for them, or resort to plagiarism. AI changed all that.<\/p>\n
\u2018Dead perfection\u2019<\/p>\n
AI\u2019s prose is perfectly mediocre, producing the sort of inert gloss that reads like a Frankensteinian amalgam of MFA-workshopped writing, an unintentional parody of the style it mimics. The resultant stories and essays are simulacra of thought, generated via pattern recognition learned from millions of human-penned words, rooted in no particular experience by no particular person. AI writing reminds me of Tennyson\u2019s description of the beautiful Maud in the titular poem<\/a>:<\/p>\n
\ndouble quotation markFaultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null
Dead perfection; no more<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\nInsightful readers feel that emptiness even if they can\u2019t articulate it. They sense that the body moves without a brain. By contrast, student-written fiction is gloriously flawed, a struggle on the page between what the author is trying to say and what\u2019s actually being said. The prose stumbles in a way reminiscent of a foal learning how to walk: even in their trembling legs I see hints of future grace. Such clumsiness is necessary; its absence would be proof of the foal never having learned to walk.<\/p>\n
Death and taxes; technophobia is the third certainty. In 1565, nearly a century after Gutenberg invented the printing press, the Swiss scientist Conrad Gessner was already worrying about the \u201cconfusing and harmful abundance of books\u201d. An 1889 article in Nature claimed the telephone is the most dangerous of all inventions \u201cbecause it enters into every dwelling. Its interminable network of wires is a perpetual menace to life and property.\u201d Now we\u2019ve added AI to the list of worries: a 2025 MIT Media Lab preliminary study<\/a> found that participants who used ChatGPT to write essays showed lower neural connectivity than those who wrote without assistance.<\/p>\n
Other studies warn of similar dangers, from not-yet-peer-reviewed reports with self-explanatory titles such as \u201cAI Assistance Reduces Persistence and Hurts Independent Performance<\/a>\u201d and \u201cGenerative Artificial Intelligence Reliance and Executive Function Attenuation: Behavioral Evidence of Cognitive Offload in High-Use Adults<\/a>\u201d. Dire stuff, if proven true. But whatever the peer-reviewed findings may be, the central warning is hard to ignore and doesn\u2019t require a study for validation: by letting students routinely and thoughtlessly use AI, we\u2019re weakening their minds. That warning shaped how I addressed AI in my syllabus. Specifically, how I planned to discourage its use:<\/p>\n
\ndouble quotation markPlaying the AI-detection game drags me into a surveillance mindset that undermines the workshop environment. If you use AI, it reveals your orientation toward writing. Do you want to make art, or just turn in text? Do you want to actually learn how to write, or just pretend to do so?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
I was certain my questions would shame them into compliance even without an explicit prohibition. So at the start of last semester, when I read two of my student\u2019s stories for the first workshop and knew within their opening paragraphs that both stories were written by AI, I was hurt. I was also worried, because I realized that for the first time as a writing professor, I had to deal with students producing words without work, which wasn\u2019t quite plagiarism and wasn\u2019t quite paying for someone else to do the job, but it felt like a kind of naive chicanery; a perversion of the contract between writer and reader.<\/p>\n
double quotation mark<\/p>\n
Writing isn\u2019t just the production of sentences \u2013 it\u2019s the training of endurance by way of sustained attention<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
As the first workshop started that night, I turned to the ostensible authors and told them I knew that AI wrote their stories. I didn\u2019t need AI-detection software to know; I just knew. The prose was too polished for a young writer, the arcs too tidy, every character prepackaged, every metaphor a pastiche without context. I told the class the workshop couldn\u2019t proceed because I won\u2019t give feedback to an author who doesn\u2019t exist, but I assured the would-be authors that they weren\u2019t in trouble. MIT\u2019s policies regarding AI usage were in flux, and my syllabus offered an opening. Besides, had AI been available during my undergrad years, would I have resisted its help? Of course not. The pedagogical borderlands have always been filled with students questing for shortcuts. The technology changes but the quest remains.<\/p>\n
For a few moments, all was quiet except the classroom\u2019s ticking radiators. Then, a teary-eyed confession: one of the ostensible authors said she only used AI because she was scared of looking stupid, of being criticized for bad writing. She said she loved writing stories and hated having used AI. But she couldn\u2019t stop herself, recounting a sequence similar to an addict\u2019s descent: at first she fed her story into AI for a grammar check, it suggested line edits and she accepted, then it asked if she wanted structural edits, then it offered to rewrite the entire piece.<\/p>\n
The other would-be author admitted he had never written a short story before and he had an idea but didn\u2019t know where to start. I asked him why he didn\u2019t reach out to me for help. He shrugged.<\/p>\n
One of the other students raised her hand, saying she didn\u2019t understand why it was bad for AI to write stories as long as the stories are based on their ideas. More students spoke: one wanted to know how using AI was any different from using a human editor. Another wanted me to answer why, at a university that launched one of the world\u2019s first AI research programs in 1959, were we even having this debate? Isn\u2019t AI meant to make everyone\u2019s life easier? Less stressful? Isn\u2019t the point of AI to free humans from the tedium of rote tasks?<\/p>\n
The conversation that followed their confessions was one of the most productive teaching moments of my eight years at MIT. Writing, I told them, isn\u2019t supposed to be easy, and of course it can be tedious but that doesn\u2019t make it rote. Writing isn\u2019t just the production of sentences \u2013 it\u2019s the training of endurance by way of sustained attention. It\u2019s a way of learning what one thinks by attempting to say it. An LLM can reproduce the appearance of that activity, but it can\u2019t replace it, because the value lies not only in the object produced but in the transformation that occurs during its making.<\/p>\n
Bringing back friction<\/p>\n