NYT: What Do Students Lose When They Stop Writing?
"AI" has existed in its current form for barely four years and the fact that it's jammed up the cognitive development of an entire generation that fast (and that there's a specific overclass of techofascists who are deeply thrilled about this) is a big damn red flag. www.nytimes.com/2026/08/17/u...
John Scalzi647Remember also there is a huge push from the right to defund and destroy public education in the United States, and "AI" destroying literacy skills under the guide of "helping students" is absolutely going to help that.
Rachel Hartman95My son, who only had one year of high school disrupted by the pandemic, and who got through three years of university before LLMs became ubiquitous, looks at the incoming uni students and says he feels like he "caught the last helicopter out of educational Saigon."
Cori Hug-Walker39the creative skills lost will actually cause dementia and Alzheimer's at a younger, more rapid rate for millennials on down, because brain exercises like reading maps, drawing, design, writing, creating music etc strengthen memory and keep your mind sharper longer
patrimanuela.bsky.social23As a teacher, I confirm this: students are less creative and able to solve problems, as they have got used to using AI. Writing is done exclusively during class and teachers have become "AI police". It is exhausting and sad.
Balrog Needs Hug16It’s an existential danger that needs to be reigned in. The damage is incomprehensible both in size and velocity.
Whaler15Without my permission or awareness an "explore the arts" day camp I sent my son to changed the curriculum from having them make art to having them "make an AI childrens book". Came home the last day with this. I am not buying it. These are 6-9 year olds. Last year it was a normal art camp.
Adam Rutherford81Just my weekly reminder that NO-ONE ASKED FOR THIS. TOOLS CREATED WITHOUT PURPOSE. Necessity is the mother of invention, and these arses are the real world physical embodiment of watching Jurassic Park and thinking it was a good idea.
Gen Wojcik39"Writing builds our working memory, executive planning skills and metacognition — the ability to think about our thinking, weigh alternate viewpoints and revise for clarity and style (...) “Writing is a technology for thinking,” Dr. Kellogg said."
Harbinger of Doom22The schools may complain about AI, but *they are also pushing it.* I got a call from my 7th-grader's computer science teacher that my 7th-grader had refused an AI lesson, and that was going to be a huge problem going forward, possibly requiring reassignment out of comp sci.
Ham Roids22Love how "remote learning is going to destroy the youth!!" To protect people in a PANDEMIC was such a deal breaker...But AI in schools and everything else is somehow okay despite clear harms??
Michael Bazemore20Jamming up cognitive capabilities is a feature, not a bug.
joey schutz12i actually lol'd at this part. how do you even satirize this!! archive.is/vqWUf
Allison Hantschel10My main beef with the idea that "AI is ruining kids' critical thinking skills" is that people hear that as a problem by and for kids. The kids didn't invent this shit and sell it to you! The kids aren't getting rich off it!
Helen McCarthy8Never forget that there are people who benefit from you being poor, ignorant and easily manipulated. They send their kids to expensive schools and want you to "educate" yours with #AI - why do you suppose that is?
Benjamin McKean6I stopped assigning papers in some of my classes because I didn’t have enough time, support from TAs, etc to give meaningful feedback to everyone, given my class sizes. AI makes that even harder; I can only confidently assign writing if the assignments will be even more carefully read and evaluated
Sargoth (discursively endogenous feliform)6Perhaps this is what all the big budget cuts prepared us for. They knew there'd be a big cognitive hit as these tools were introduced, and so they needed a cadre of fully prepared but unemployed academics at the ready to swoop in to rebuild the ashes in the aftermath
“Writing builds our working memory, executive planning skills and metacognition — the ability to think about our thinking, weigh alternate viewpoints and revise for clarity and style. It takes decades to develop writing skills, from toddlerhood into adulthood.”
Hypervisible 248The extent to which these companies (and the people who represent them) are actively hostile to students cannot be overstated. “Students need to write well enough to have a sense of which A.I. text suggestions to accept and which to reject” is something to articulate if profit is the *only* motive.
Katie L. Thompson5This reminds me of old people playing bingo. Have you ever actually watched old people play bingo??? That shit is *serious business*. They move FAST & they are EFFICIENT. You can see the wheels in their brains moving. Every time my mom forgets something, I tell her she needs to go play bingo.
PJ 🌻1Oh how far Grammarly has come from a writing aide startup to a full-blown San Francisco VC corp, now fully enshittified with “AI.” Just horrible.
Oatmeal Enthusiast43I appreciate these articles pointing out the corrosive effects of AI on education, but wish they didn’t always default end by regurgitating industry propaganda about how students need to do at least some assignments with AI to prepare for some nebulous future.
Nathan K. Hensley41This NYT article that’s been going around is good & welcome, and yet a brutal takeaway is the fact that its v. basic points about the (obvious) relationship between thinking & writing and their (equally obvious) value is framed as counterpoint to the general discourse or common sense position. Dark.
Renata Gomes19O que ganhamos (ou, no caso, perdemos) deveria ser auto-evidente, pq tds escrevemos, mas não é: "Escrever constrói nossa memória de trabalho, planejamento executivo e metacognição – a habilidade de pensar sobre o pensamento, pesar pontos de vista alternativos e revisar buscando clareza e estilo..."
Laminariales12LLM use is a preventable form of environmental dementia. Using LLMs causes physical changes in the brain, specifically: neural networks in our brains do not strengthen and connect in the various ways we need for learning/skill-building when "learning" is made up of receiving answers to questions.
Grayson Morley9The attempt to commodify writing is an attempt to cease thought altogether. Better to sell you a belief than to allow you to formulate it yourself.
Federally Subsidized Kool-Aid Jammer4The amount of people who dont realize the inability to read and write affects your overall intelligence is astonishing. I'm not talking about people who dont have access to institutions or resources. I mean people who have had access to schooling who literally can't write a sentence w/o AI.
Sleeping until thunderclash announced2Corporations: outsource everything including your thinking.
Litbowl2Burn ed-tech to the ground. If you are a parent, a teacher, a student, or just a person who cares at all about humanity and the future—please get engaged with whatever your local school district is doing and fight back with groups like @aimoratoriumnyc.bsky.social
A few things: (1) AI should not be used to assist writing. Cognitive outsourcing is bad. (2) The college essay is on the decline because of labor as much as AI. Learning to write well requires a lot of personal contact which neoliberal logics of higher ed work against www.nytimes.com/2026/08/17/u...
Mark Williams15Really good thread. I've been wanting to run a core (hell, even optional) module just to teach how historians can write across different modes and genres and forms. To try to untether students from ideas of what historical writing 'has to be'. But that's not how the mill works.
Charlotte Canning13Yes to all this! Writing well is hard and teaching it a very labor intensive activity, I think writing will be eliminated from the hired curriculum and replaced by AI.
Karen Racine11There are few things wrong with the world today that simply being funded and staffed at full and appropriate levels would not fix.
Dr. Erika Graham-Goering8Particularly struck by this discussion of the importance of staff-student ratios to teaching academic writing, as I see more funding going towards calls for projects to improve teaching quality, when of course the easiest and best way to improve teaching quality is just *hire more permanent staff*.
Very good development that this thinking is breaking through to the mainstream, as illustrated by @danagoldstein.bsky.social's article in today's Times. Many of us writing teachers have been issuing these warnings for years and now we're having a better conversation. www.nytimes.com/2026/08/17/u...
Lisa Messeri27Paraphrasing a Superhuman (Grammarly) employee: "Educators who try to withhold A.I. writing tools are essentially announcing to their students — 'consumers,' she called them — that their coursework is irrelevant to the job market." Adding "no Grammarly" to my syllabus AI policy.
David Hunter8“Writing is the technology of thinking.”
Jenny Marie5Lots of good resources here
"Educators who try to withhold A.I. writing tools are essentially announcing to their students — ‘consumers,’ [the Grammarly employee] called them — that their coursework is irrelevant to the job market." IDK seems to me like turning education into transactional job training is the problem.
Joe Dunman3Literally impossible for education to be irrelevant to human labor.
Shell3I am so very tired of hearing educators here say that AI is the future and you have to use it to be employable. Not only is it untrue, and not only are schools not employee factories, but if you wanted tech for jobs you’d teach slack, jira, trello, miro and workday.
