I Prefer Not To: Literary Laments in the Age of AI Dead Letters

The . . . English teacher will be fulfilling his responsibility if he furnishes the student a guided opportunity, through the best writing of the past . . . He will teach literature, not social studies or little lessons in democracy or the customs of many lands.

And if the student finds that this is not to his taste? Well, that is regrettable. Most regrettable. His taste should not be consulted; it is being formed.

– Flannery O’Connor

Artificial intelligence gets the best of me most days. It demands too much. It takes a profession that I love and turns it into a soul-crushing curse. A wyrd sister spell full of “toil and trouble.” A “hell-broth boil and bubble” that acclimated to the human mind turns “fair to foul, and foul to fair”—leaving behind the “fog and filthy air” of gaslighting declarations such as, “I wrote it myself . . . studies show Turnitin is not reliable.”

Never mind that most English teachers with more than a decade of grading thousands of essays do not require such confirmation. Either AI was used, or I have become a miracle-working instructor that can turn a college freshman writer to a PhD level in a matter of weeks, sometimes within seconds. And this miracle occurs despite less than half of high school graduates in our state being college ready.

Where I once in-formed young minds, I now work to undo the de-formed. The falsely self-assured plagiarist who claims the inhuman derived prose is their own “instead of the cross, the Albatross / about [their] neck is hung.” A weight they are beginning to consider, as Jeff Sharlet points out in this article in The Chronicles of Higher Education. The visible burden of an inflated GPA they did not earn is causing “corroded mental health,” cynicism, and “some are filled with guilt.” I too, pay a similar price in a current system where credentials risk losing their meaning. Simulated competence “yaws and founders” toward shipwreck. Employers cry fraud. Students cry fraud. Instructors cry fraud. And universities cry “fraud” too, though the confusion may be one they helped create.

Sharlet found that students do not pay attention to AI policies, sensing the college does not really “want to know what is going on.” This may be because the policy is not applied evenly when it is applied. They point out that colleges give “mixed signals.” Students feel betrayed by the college, their instructors, and themselves. According to student journalist Theo Baker, the deeper cause is that universities “[devalue] the idea of intellectual formation for its own sake”

It is an old problem. G.K. Chesterton wrote about it in Orthodoxy in 1908: “ . . . most of the machinery of modern language is labour-saving machinery; and it saves mental labour very much more than it ought.”

Writing is a living manifestation of thought. It is “thinking” in motion, as well as a new creation as students fill each word with a part of themselves. In The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis warned what might happen when we have removed “the organ” yet demand “the function.” That function in our case is real, honest thinking. And we are losing it quietly, efficiently, and at scale. Back to Chesterton: “Long words go rattling by us like long railway trains . . . we know they are carrying thousands who are too tired or too indolent to walk and think for themselves.”

And since this is a literary apologetic, let us have a metaphor.

In 1983, Nobel physicist Richard Feynman explained in the BBC Fun to Imagine series that people think trees grow from soil, yet he argues that almost all the tree comes from the air. Only a small amount comes from the ground. The tree’s substance is carbon that comes from carbon dioxide in the air combined with water in the form of rain, which also comes from the air. The sun powers the living tree, separating the oxygen from the carbon dioxide and spitting it back out. The tree then is made of what we cannot see. Tons of the mature oak seem to appear from nothing—yet it is made from something “passing-through.” The by-product is oxygen. A tree takes in what we breathe out and returns to us oxygen to fill our lungs, and this is not by intention, but the exhaust the process emits. The result is growth. Ring after ring, it forms another year of rising toward the sun.

Likewise, an essay is simply a by-product, not the goal. A student writing an essay is in the process of a formation that is invisible, but active and measurable—they are becoming. Not a tree of course, but a human (and it is interesting to ponder that the materials associated with writing derive from trees). True wisdom is built during the writing, ring by ring, whether the student is aware or not. The consequence is growth, and the capacity remains in the student with each subsequent essay. Maturation comes when living things interact with their proper environment. I argue that a similar thing is happening in the Humanities department, as we provide the conditions upon which formation occurs. Simply providing content, which is what LLMs do, is an artificial environment producing dead letters.

Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener offers us another example. Bartelby is a copyist who one day refuses to copy another line. By the end of the story, we find that Bartelby had once worked in the Dead Letter Office. This is undeliverable correspondence, written to people who have passed away. Meaning that arrived nowhere. It is not difficult to imagine what years of that sort of work might do to a person. At least it is not for me. Conversely, and equally soul-killing, AI-generated prose arrives without having been sent by anyone. No mind wrestled toward it. No self was formed in its making. It is a letter written to no one, by no one. Princeton professor Rory Truex gives a name to the place where these sorts of letters accumulate: the “shell university.” It is an essay written by a machine and I am asked to grade it as if I were a machine. Like Bartleby, I prefer not to.

When the process of formation is continually bypassed, the instructor is forced into an Orwellian 2 + 2 = 5, unless she can prove otherwise with something more than a detection tool. Conditioning sets in. And so. It goes. Passing grades for those who did not do the work is a moral injury to both student and teacher. Ethical dissonance over time wears the psyche down. The injustice of the C student, who does their own work, and the A student that does not, will the piper pay. The spuriously gained fake scholarship will cost us all—one day. Dostoevsky understood this. The crime may remain invisible. The punishment will not.

Perhaps for this reason, Princeton’s Honor Code, which has been in effect for a hundred and thirty-three years (surviving two world wars), finally broke under the weight of AI. The faculty voted to return proctors to the exam room. Under the old code, the students promised in writing that they wrote the papers themselves without help from others. The idea back then was that Princeton did not want students and instructors living under suspicion. It was a time when “honor” was highly valued. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that violating the code “simply doesn’t occur to you, any more than it would occur to you to rifle your roommate’s pocketbook.” And this is the rub, because students and teachers still today value honor. It is presuppositional inside of us. This is why we all pay “interest” on the debt of subverting our own conscience. The student who knows the legitimate work was not done, and the instructor that knows the same. But in a system in which competing for grades leads to scholarships, and better opportunity in careers—inside a system where others are doing it, the justification becomes an “arms race.” The student who does not use it, is disadvantaged in the short run. The Faustian bargain is loathsome, yet we are all caught on the horns of the dilemma.

This is as Lewis predicted in The Abolition of Man: “we make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour, and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.” And there has never been a more accurate prophecy, not in 1984, not in Brave New World. We award students a GPA, based on the minutes of work it took to generate prose and say: go and be a success! Yet we have off-loaded sustained attention in reading, slow thinking in analyzing, the challenge of sound argument, the arduous labor of writing, and still we wonder where all the durable skills have gone.

Some grading days are the ones in which I wish I could retire—if I were made of less grit. But, like Mattie Ross, “I will not put a thief in my mouth to steal my brains” and I will not allow students in the classroom to put a thief in their brain and steal theirs. Composition books and in-class essay writing offer respite to myself and my weary students, who express relief when I tell them, “pull out your pencils and notebooks” and let’s begin. We are literarily all on the same page.

At the end of spring semester, an English I student gave me a special gift of gratitude. She remembered my instruction on the importance of owning the right pen/pencil and paper, and how making an investment in those items impacts their use. I lamented that I seldom purchased for myself the Italian premium Moleskine brand, known for its understated design, rounded corners, oilcloth-feel hard cover, elastic closure band, ribbon bookmark, and expandable inner pocket at the back. I tell them it was fashioned after the notebooks of Picasso, Van Gogh, and Hemingway. Of course they find my stationery enthusiasm amusing.

Her gift was a dark blue Italian Moleskine Notebook. Announcing its arrival was a small hand painted watercolor of a hobbit-hole door on a note card, sealed in green wax. A threshold into another world, it invited me to “come and write” —the way I had bid my students.

While grading finals, I stop and stare at the burnt orange door. These are not dead letters piled in front of me. I smile to think of Tolkien grading over two hundred essays, every one written by humans, and jotting down on the back of one . . . “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” Tolkien and his many other worlds were being formed alongside his students. I set my grading marker aside and open the notebook to the first blank page. I pick up my pencil and begin to write.

The meaning had indeed arrived.

A watercolor painting of a hobbit hole gifted to the author by a student

Image Credit: Pintrest