By Sydni Worley, Online Editor-in-Chief
Imagine a world where stories die. The labor it takes to grab a pen and write 2,000 words of your own thoughts is never valued again and the books we read are merely the author’s ideas woven together with AI generated jumble to ensure all sentences are without mistakes and human touch. Younger generations will never have to gawk in fear as their teacher assigns them a 10 page paper. We will never have to think for ourselves again. As AI has continued to develop, this has been my fear.
I went to lunch with Dr. Johnny Wink at Ambar, his favorite restaurant in town. As we walked in, Dr. Wink greeted the host and servers in Spanish, they knew him. Dr. Wink is a regular here and any observer could tell the servers’ eyes lit up as he walked through the doors. Dr. Wink has that type of effect on people. As they continued to talk back and forth in Spanish, I started to wonder why I had left behind my duolingo days. Language is so beautiful. For an hour and a half, Dr. Wink and I talked about writing.
He came to work at Ouachita in 1973. He is one of the most passionate teachers and outside the Ouachita walls, he is known as a “legend.” He has a knack for turning his classroom into a world of its own. When it comes to students using AI when completing work he assigned, Wink notes that he always knows it is AI. “I’m not going to use my energy to try and catch people.”
Dr. Wink recalled a time when a student of his used AI for every paper he wrote. “If you know someone is using it, you can find fault,” Dr. Wink noted. One week, the student was assigned to write a story on “the best day of your life,” and he could easily tell it was not written by the student. Instead of meeting with the student and accusing him of cheating, Dr. Wink pulled out a red pen and got to work, noting every fault. At the end of the semester, Dr. Wink wrote on the bottom of his paper, “Part of my fun in being a teacher is getting to know a student better through reading their writing, and I haven’t gotten to know you this semester.” Dr. Wink shook his head as he recalled this story, “What a waste that was for the both of us.”
Professor Jennifer Pittman, Chair of the Language and Literature Department, explained, “A lot of times we do know [they are using AI]. Students aren’t using it well. They haven’t been trained to use it in every individual class.”
The process Pittman follows usually takes one to two hours to put the student’s work through AI detectors to be fully confident the work was AI and not the students. As she explained this, something Dr Wink had said echoed in the back of my mind: “What a waste that was for the both of us.”
Dr. Wink was quick to tell me that he is just a “wishful thinker.” He can’t imagine a world where everyone leaves writing and storytelling behind. ”If [AI] did lead to some homogenization, that would just be terrible!” Dr. Wink said.
Even still, he doesn’t believe AI is all bad. ”People are so quick to call it evil. There was a time where writing was considered evil. And now we have artificial intelligence and there are people who think it will be the ruin of us. But I hope not.”
This May, Dr. Wink is retiring from his 52 years of being a professor at Ouachita. I will be walking and receiving my diploma this May as well with a degree in Communications and Writing. I can’t help but be a “wishful thinker” with him.
Then there is Professor Sarah Smith. In comparison to Dr. Wink, her teaching career has many years left. She will have to continue to deal with AI head-on.
Her office is calm. She always keeps the artificial light out, welcoming the natural light whatever it may be: sunny, cloudy, or something in between. Three bookshelves line the walls and at the front of the office, is a coffee station. It’s the writer’s paradise. I sit in her office as she talks passionately about reading and writing. As she speaks, I start to find hope amidst the chaos of the world: artificial intelligence can never replace authenticity.
Professor Smith has seen students use AI before and in her experience, a lot of the work just sounds like nonsense. But even with students being tempted to use AI right now, Professor Smith believes people will come back to writing. “There is something about the process that is so useful,” said Smith. “I know that some people have shown how AI can create artwork or write poems, but people are looking for a real connection.”
Smith believes that most of us write to process our emotions and to know what we think and AI doesn’t help with that. “Writing where human connection is the point, people will backtrack because of that,” said Smith. “People are looking for a real relationship between the author and the audience. I’m not just writing a story for another story. I’m writing because I have something to share.”
Unfortunately, as our world, particularly the US, continues to push for efficiency, stressed out students or employees may turn to AI more and more. They don’t have time to do their own work, which could devalue writing along with the English department as a whole. People are reading essays that are titled things like “Death of the English Major” and concluding that writing has lost all value. Professor Pittman, Dr. Wink, and Professor Smith believe these critics have it all wrong.
“Going to college is not about getting a job,” Professor Pittman said. “It’s about learning how to think and develop skills.” There are countless jobs people can get without a degree. The purpose of going to college is about widening your horizons, stepping out of your comfort zone and learning to understand the world outside of the lens you grew up in.
“We are giving students valuable critical thinking skills – that is invaluable, especially at a liberal arts school,” said Pittman.
We are in an ever changing world today. Technology is adapting faster than we can comprehend, and in these times, everyone needs to be learning how to solve problems and think outside the box. “That’s why I think the English major is the best in a changing world. We teach students how to do that in this department,” said Pittman.
Dr. Wink watches as people devalue what he has dedicated years of his life studying. “While I am a wishful thinker when it comes to [AI], I am feeling like chaos is ensuing,” said Wink. ”We are in unhappy times… STEM rules. I watch on the news – humanities is declining.” Dr. Wink shook his head as he said, “Our world would be robotic. There are practical reasons as well as aesthetic reasons to keep [the humanities] alive – there is something valuable about reading Dickens!”
Despite the negativity in the world, these professors remain hopeful that writing will never lose its value. ”One of the things about the humanities is that it finds people,” said Smith. “People will come back to these things because we need them.” In one of Professor Smith’s master courses, she was in class with a lot of full-time nurses. “These nurses were drawn to healthcare to take care of people going through hard times. They were prepared on how to draw blood and take care of a patient, but their education hadn’t equipped them for how to handle or cope with things at work or in their lives.” These nurses turn to writing to find hope and to process their emotions in a way that STEM simply never could. It is in the imperfections of human writing, that answers are found. As Professor Smith said, in the process of writing: “It’s in the trying and trying again that we actually get to know anything at all—including ourselves.” AI can never replace this process.
AI may dominate our society at the moment, but a robot can never replace the emotional intelligence and eloquence of the common man’s writing, mistakes and all, even if that means a missing comma here and there. People will never stop valuing the authentic work of individuals, AI may even just bring that to light even more so. These professors understand the value of writing; it is crucial and irreplaceable. Perhaps we shouldn’t even try to imagine a world where stories die, but rather be “wishful thinkers” and refuse to believe this could ever even be a possibility.
