I knew my writing students were using AI. Their confessions led to a powerful teaching moment (The Guardian, 5/10/26)

[highplainsdem]

This is from Micah Nathan, "a novelist, essayist and MIT lecturer in fiction and nonfiction writing whose books include Gods of Aberdeen and Losing Graceland."

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/may/10/fiction-writing-professor-ai

AI’s 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’s description of the beautiful Maud in the titular poem:
Faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null
Dead perfection; no more

Insightful readers feel that emptiness even if they can’t 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’s 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.

-snip-

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’t supposed to be easy, and of course it can be tedious but that doesn’t make it rote. Writing isn’t just the production of sentences – it’s the training of endurance by way of sustained attention. It’s a way of learning what one thinks by attempting to say it. An LLM can reproduce the appearance of that activity, but it can’t replace it, because the value lies not only in the object produced but in the transformation that occurs during its making.

-snip-

Since that night, our workshops have changed in ways I didn’t anticipate. We talk more openly about frustration, about the moments when a draft resists its own author. I still teach craft – form, structure, revision – but find myself returning to the tension between thought and language, the stories where abstraction refuses to take shape. We discuss why their thinking matters, that their struggle to translate thoughts into word isn’t evidence of failure, but a sign of growth. Even when, and especially when, words fail. What my students and I now guard isn’t a boundary against machines so much as a sanctuary for authorship, a place where everything on the page and not yet on the page belongs to an actual person.

Much more at the link - and IMO this is the best piece I've run across yet on how someone teaching writing should deal with students tempted to use AI.

I'll admit my experience of fiction-writing classes and workshopping is limited to only 1 fiction-writing course in college where I cut over half the classes. The teacher wanted some of the stories (not all) read aloud. He wanted the class to analyze and comment on what he considered the best and the worst. I saw just one example of knives out for a poor student whose story that tenured professor didn't like - most of the time he let students do the critiquing - and after that I skipped as many classes as possible, showing up to get the next assignment, when he would tell me to read the last story I'd turned in, which I didn't like doing, either. He gave me an A on every story but a B for the class (pissing me off because it lowered my grade average). Years later when we were both with friends drinking at a bar near the campus, I heard him announce loudly and drunkenly that "all male writers are bastards, and all female writers are bitches." Which I thought explained why he'd been willing to target some students whose stories he didn't like for very harsh criticism via their classmates. I also knew by then that he'd worked as an editor in NYC for years before turning to teaching, and I guessed after hearing that bitter remark that his bad relationships with writers were why he'd made the switch. He could bully - or try to bully - students. It was less likely to have worked for him with professional writers.

Micah Nathan is a much better teacher. He really does make his classroom "a sanctuary for authorship." He let his students talk about various reasons they might choose to have AI write for them, and then he explained why it was still best not to use AI.

More students spoke: one wanted to know how using AI was any different from using a human editor.

That made me laugh because of a personal memory of a journalism major I was trying to help who made lots of spelling errors he simply didn't bother to correct. This was back in the olden days before spell checkers and autocorrect. He explained to me that correcting those errors was "the editor's job" - using a tone I'd probably describe as mansplaining today. I explained to him, as patiently as I could, that while editors might be forgiving of established writers occasionally submitting what looked like unusually sloppy work, until he reached that point he'd actually be judged by what was already on the page, and editors might not get past an error-filled first page before rejecting it. I hope he understood that, if he continued with the journalism major.

And I hope students eventually understand why using AI is a bad idea.

[BComplex]

1. Thanks for this, highplainsdem! Great article showing AI shortcomings.

Articulates exactly what can be applied to any new AI fields of study. Brilliant!

[highplainsdem]

5. You're welcome! I knew I had to share this as soon as I read it.

[ratchiweenie]

2. Great article. Hope this is happening in classes everywhere.

[highplainsdem]

6. I do, too. Sadly, there are a lot of admins who've fallen for AI hype and want even the youngest students

to begin using it. And the generative AI companies would like nearly cradle-to-grave dependence on AI, with users so addicted they'll be willing to pay thousands of dollars a year, maybe even a month.

I love seeing resistance to AI, from people who know - and can explain - just how harmful it is.

[SidneyR]

3. I teach political science, sociology, and history at a community college.

Bowing to reality, my class allows AI but requires honesty in its use. This statement is posted:

AI Use Integrated: This course's generative AI policy acknowledges the use of AI is an essential skill in today's world. By using genAI for specific purposes, students become equipped with relevant skills and tools necessary to thrive in a technology-driven society. Emphasizing the mastery of generative AI should empower you to harness its potential, enhancing your problem-solving abilities and preparing you for future challenges and opportunities. Be aware, however, that any time generative AI is used at any point in the assignment without attribution it may be considered a violation of CCV's Academic Integrity Policy.

So students can use it, but I tell them that honesty requires them to cite that usage, and explain how it helped them write their essay.

[highplainsdem]

4. AI use will still hurt their ability to reason and communicate. It will make them dependent on AI. It

will mean they'll understand and remember less of whatever they used AI to help with.

But I realize a lot of school admins are foolishly emphasizing AI use over real learning.

[GenThePerservering]

7. Your experience with 'creative writing class' sound like mine

I took three classes, all three were dead failures - male teachers who wooed the pretty female students and the male students they deemed 'cool' and the rest of us just struggled along with disdain. It was like some kind of social experience with these guys.

So I just practiced and took some great non-credit classes just from local writers who had a far better understanding of craft, similar to Micah Nathan - I treasure that experience and it taught me a lot. I was in classes with all sorts of just working class people like myself.

His insights into AI and what it really does are valuable.

[highplainsdem]

8. I'm so sorry you ran into teachers that bad, but I'm glad you found local writers teaching classes

that taught you much more.

I don't think I got As on my stories from that professor because he was wooing me - I rarely saw him, and he was already quite old, and from what I learned later, very happily married - but I think that was the same semester I ran into harassment from a poli sci professor (that was my major) who told me I deserved a C but he'd give me an A because he "liked" me. He then asked me out. He was about 60, and married, had once been the dept chair. I turned him down, then waited to see what he'd do with that grade. He apparently thought twice about trying to give me a C for turning him down, which was a wise decision. The dean had approved my taking 24 hours of classes that semester, mostly poli sci and history with a lot of reading, and I'd worked hard to get good grades. (Otoh, I wasn't going to argue getting a B for a fiction-writing course where I'd cut most of the classes. Though I had told the professor I couldn't stand seeing the students he thought were worst just torn to shreds.)

Anyway, those female students who seemed to be teacher's pets at the time might've been running into all sorts of nasty harassment when other students weren't around. Shame on those professors for favoring ANY students, though. It's terrible that you encountered that even once. Three times is nightmarish.

Aspiring writers deserve encouragement whenever possible.

That MIT prof is brilliant.

[GenThePerservering]

9. I was a homely girl which in a way was a superpower

men didn't hassle me, I could do what I wanted, and the ones who did engage were friends and really great guys because they didn't play those games. It hampered me with some classes, though - this was back in the day.

In one class, the two women students the prof was favouring were very angry at the discrimination - I was the other woman and there were three guys, and the four of us worked like dogs whilst the two pretty women just were handed A grades - they hated it, and felt they were being really ripped off and we were being discriminated against. Our department head, however, would have been VERY receptive if the two women had complained about this prof - she was no nonsense and would have had him on the carpet, tenured or not. So if he had pulled anything, she would have had their back.

ETA: Edited for tenses derangement - I just got done with hot yoga and my brain is fried lol.