Why Human Writing Is Essential in the Age of AI
Personal Perspective: The case for preserving college writing programs.
Updated August 17, 2025 | Reviewed by Kaja Perina
I love teaching writing. It's my favorite job ever. Part of the reason it's fun is that I get to teach something I'm passionate about. But that's more about me, not my students. What I love about teaching writing to my students is that it feels like I'm helping them learn how to (really) think for the first time, and that's an exciting experience for them.
Why do college students use AI?
I regularly teach writing fundamentals to our freshmen. They come in with all sorts of assumptions: I'm going to make them read excerpts from " boring " literature and then test their reading comprehension a là American public education ; they'll be found out as "terrible writers" and bring an F home for the holidays; or writing doesn't matter so they'll just have AI write their essays so they can pass my "stupid class."
My job is to dispel these common misconceptions and help them enjoy the writing process so they leave my class feeling more confident as thinkers and writers. And I am over the moon when this happens.
Enter AI, specifically large language models (LLMs like ChatGPT). If you've ever played around with ChatGPT, you know how amazingly "knowledgeable" and efficient it is (and with such impeccable manners). It's masterful at writing clear, informative, and grammatically sound text in seconds, provided your prompt is detailed enough. Now imagine the college freshman taking a five-course load while trying to maintain a respectable GPA and have fun in college, the temptation to use GPTs to write their essays can be too much to resist.
Estimates vary, but many point to about half of all surveyed college students using GPTs to write their college essays. And it's not just students, of course. There are several cases in the news right now of students suing universities after discovering their professors were using AI to "write" feedback on their papers. And in my own editing work, I've seen writing from fellow professionals that I strongly suspect was AI-generated when that was explicitly prohibited.
We're living in the wild west of AI.
The management of AI in higher education is currently a big mess: no one seems to agree on when and how to use it; it's almost impossible to definitively prove writing is AI-generated since the detection tools vary wildly in their assessments; and there's no agreement on how to sanction its misuse even within singular departments at a given university. In short, we're living in the wild west of AI right now.
I think it's reasonable to assume that if students increasingly use AI for assigned writing, university administrators will consider eliminating the salaried humans they employ to teach writing. Higher education is big business these days, and like all successful businesses, universities like to stuff their coffers.
I asked ChatGPT to give me three reasons universities should preserve their human-run writing programs, and I quote here its output: " 1. Writing is thinking. Without the mental discipline of structuring ideas and arguments, students can’t judge the accuracy or quality of AI output; 2. Voice and ethics matter. AI can mimic style, but it can’t teach students to express their own convictions responsibly; and 3. AI makes literacy more urgent. To use AI well, students must know how writing works — so they can refine, fact-check, and adapt what it produces."
Note that only output #2 is student-focused; #1 and #3 are about making students more effective at interacting with AI ---a mission that was never part of the college writing teaching paradigm.
Human writing versus AI-generated writing.
What ChatGPT missed (and we forgive it since it never took my class, went to college, or learned how to think) is what I see as the quintessential gift that writing in college gives to students, namely, the insight that writing is a method for self-discovery.
I explain to my students that writing is a process of making the subconscious conscious—of bringing hazy, half-baked assumptions, biases, intuitions, ideas, anxieties, and hopes to the surface. Often, we don't know what we believe until we start writing. We put our feelings and experiences into words and stories, even arguments, and through that arduous process, we begin to feel utterly human.
LLMs are trained on millions of datasets of human-generated language and have become remarkably adept at simulating how human communication works. Alan Turing would be blown away by a simple exchange with ChatGPT-5.
Relying on LLMs to do our writing for us when it's not sanctioned is not just lazy and dishonest; it's also acquiescing our unique human insight in exchange for a simulated human milieu averaged across millions of humans. It's our little ant brain taking over. For college students, ostensibly devoting four years of their life to learning and self-discovery, it's the ultimate self-defeat.
I hope universities choose to preserve their writing programs, recognizing human writing as essential to fostering intelligent, self-aware thinkers, because though AI can "write" for us, it's an average kind of writing that's devoid of the self-discovery benefits we earn from doing it ourselves. And also because we need more thoughtful humans, not more efficient AI-interactors.
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Liz Swan, Ph.D. , is a writer and philosopher who teaches writing at the University of Colorado Boulder. She enjoys writing about all the facets of human nature—the light, the dark, and the shades of grey in between.
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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.