My sense is that the notion of losing one’s voice has created a great deal of resistance to AI.

On your podcast this morning, you mentioned language—specifically that English sometimes lacks the vocabulary to express what we want to convey, while other languages can do it more precisely. That was my takeaway.

But let me take that a step further. Let’s say my working vocabulary is about 100 words—probably not far off—yet my 30-year-old dictionary is five inches thick. I played Scrabble with my wife and daughter recently, and most of my words were two or three letters. Needless to say, I didn’t win.

So what voice do I really have to lose? I’m not Shakespeare. But I do have a lot of ideas, reflections, and I consider myself creative.

Then AI LLMs come along. I currently work with four different AIs to help articulate my ideas. Sometimes I’ll have a two-hour conversation about a topic and turn that into a draft. Other times I write a rough draft using my “100-word vocabulary,” then run it through the AIs for critique to uncover blind spots. I push back constantly—debating word choice, phrasing, even the occasional em dash. My lastest piece, on morality, was a 20-hour investment.

Yet in everything I’ve published on Substack, not a single commenter has said, “Oh, AI wrote that.” What I hope I’ve produced are my ideas, clearly articulated in ways I couldn’t achieve with my limited vocabulary alone.

So here’s the future I envision. Around 1990, students were required to hand in typewritten assignments. By about 2030, it may be the next phase, an assignment will be expected to be polished by AI.

I completely agree with your point that educators will need to rethink things and get creative with redesign. It’s one thing to ask AI to write an essay about my summer vacation at Disneyland. It’s another to take my own rough draft of that trip and refine it.

And finally, for those who criticize others for using AI in their writing: many of the critics I’ve seen here on Substack could probably benefit from a little polish themselves. ✨