EDITORS' CORNER
One writing scholar is sounding the alarm on a growing trend among college students to use AI to help write personal memoirs and essays about their lives.
It’s one thing to use AI for research or writing essays on subjects like history and science, but Ellen O’Connell Whittet, a lecturer in the writing program at the University of California at Santa Barbara, wrote that students are increasingly using tools like ChatGPT to create or flesh out their own memories for personal essays.
For example, one student “recreated a father-son hike up Half Dome, hoping to dramatize the moment when he began to see his father as more than just a parent,” O’Connell Whittet wrote in an Aug. 11 piece for The Chronicle of Higher Education.
“Some students have admitted they use AI to organize their personal memories,” she added. “They feed in their traumas, their family histories, their griefs, and their joys. In some cases I suspect they feed it experiences they haven’t personally lived through but believe will read well in a personal essay. The spectrum of AI-assisted storytelling I now see ranges from augmentation to fabrication.”
What’s lost is the growth that only comes through grappling with past traumas, experiences, and feelings, she wrote.
“In trauma-informed pedagogy, we talk a lot about the value of reflective writing as a healing practice. Students working through personal material in class often report clarity, closure, even catharsis,” O’Connell Whittet wrote.
“But AI circumvents the reflective process. Students input the raw material — their memories, emotions, pain, wisdom — and receive back a neatly packaged narrative, complete with metaphor, pacing, and insight. What’s lost is the slow reckoning, the discovery, the meaning-making.”
Plagiarism-detection systems are imperfect and working against an uphill battle, so she noted she is employing methods such as pre-writing processes, “helping students excavate what’s truly theirs: details, images, emotions that no machine could invent, through memory-mapping exercises where they visualize significant places in their lives.”
She is also assigning students tasks such as “sensory-detail inventories.”
But perhaps most importantly, she wrote she’s “talking more openly about what’s at stake: not just a grade, but the chance to know yourself better through writing.”
“…This is the case we must make as writing teachers: that personal essays matter not just for their structure, but for their struggle.”
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IMAGE CAPTION AND CREDIT: A person typing on a laptop / Teerasan Phutthigorn, Shutterstock
