A Wellesley College English professor explores the existential threat artificial intelligence poses to human creativity, arguing that the slow, deliberate process of writing is essential to genuine knowledge.

Key Points

• The author, a department chair at Wellesley College, observes that AI tools like Google’s "Help Me Write" threaten the human capacity for original, associative thought.
• The essay contrasts the "active gaps" of human hesitation—seen in the manuscripts of Emily Dickinson—with the efficiency-driven, capitalist model of time promoted by big tech.
• The author highlights the decline of humanities departments and the loss of serious arts coverage as evidence of a broader cultural shift toward prioritizing immediate, marketable outcomes.
• The text references The Book of Knowledge, an early 20th-century encyclopedia, as a model for discovery-based learning that resists the search-optimized nature of modern databases.
• The author updated his classroom AI policy to acknowledge that detecting machine-generated text is increasingly difficult, shifting his stance toward creating intentional communities of human writers.

Why it Matters

The rapid integration of AI into academic and professional writing risks eroding the human ability to engage in deep, time-intensive intellectual work. By prioritizing efficiency over the "unfinished" nature of human thought, society may lose the capacity for the original, critical inquiry that defines the humanities.