20 Articles about Cover Letters & Personal Statements

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Flattened Writing

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My version of “human” is no longer acceptable. What’s actually happening is not AI detection; it’s enforcement. We’re enforcing a narrow, flattened version of what “human writing” is supposed to look like. For emerging writers, it doesn’t just challenge their credibility; it destabilizes their confidence before they’ve even had the chance to build it. It tells them that their voice is not something to develop, but something to dilute until it passes inspection. -Denise Zubizarreta writing in Technical.ly

AI Detectors are not Lie Detectors

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What’s really happening is that human expression is being measured against a distorted reflection of itself. So what does it mean that I “sound like AI”? It means I’ve internalized patterns that are now statistically recognizable. It means I’ve developed consistency, structure and voice. It means I write in a way that is legible, repeatable and coherent. In any other context, that would be called skill. In today’s world, it becomes suspicious. -Denise Zubizarreta writing in Technical.ly

32 Recent Articles about AI & Writing

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What 370,000 College Essays Tell Us About A.I.’s Effects on Creativity: Writing is fundamental to how we think – New York Times

How to Deal With Students Using AI to Cheat – Wall Street Journal  

Was a short story that shared a prestigious prize this week written with artificial intelligence? – New York Times

I’m an AI ethicist accused of AI plagiarism. Now what? - Technical.ly

Ban for Authors Submitting AI Content ‘Welcome but Unenforceable’ – Inside Higher Ed 

This Literary AI Scandal Changes Everything – The Atlantic

I’m a Professional Writer Who Uses A.I. It’s Not As Scary As I Thought. – Slate

‘Obvious markers of AI’: doubts raised over winner of short story prize – The Guardian

Book on Truth in the Age of A.I. Contains Quotes Made Up by A.I. – New York Times

The prevalence of AI content is growing rapidly and ‘it’s not just X, it’s Y’ – Tech Crunch

College students are noticing their AI‑smoothed writing sounds strong — and not like them – The Conversation 

AI hasn't overtaken human writers online – Axios

AI writing is impossible to avoid, is making everything sound the same, and is driving us crazy. – 404 Media  

Is AI bad for critical thinking? It depends on when you use it – Science News  

Writers Are Going to Extremes to Prove They Didn’t Use AI – Wall Street Journal

AI is changing how we write and speak – Axios  

Why I Teach My Students to Write With AI – University of Central Florida

Nothing is “100% human authored” – London School of Economics & Political Science

Don’t let your students use AI as a ghostwriter – Nature  

New Browser Plugin Adds Typos to Your AI-Generated Emails to Make Them Look Real – Futurism  

This new tool makes AI's role in student writing visible – Phys.org

An elite Wall Street law firm has apologized to a federal judge for submitting a court filing full of A.I. “hallucinations.” – New York Times

The Human Skill That Eludes AI – The Atlantic

Google Search is now using AI to replace headlines – The Verge  

WordPress.com now lets AI agents write and publish posts, and more – Tech Crunch

How A.I. Killed Student Writing (and Revived It) - New York Times 

Could AI write this column? In a world of slop-inion, I’m certifying myself human – The Guardian

How Are Your Teachers Handling Writing in the Age of A.I.? – New York Times  

Sports Illustrated Just Deleted Every Article by One of Its Writers After Accusation of AI Plagiarism – Futurism

Could you spot an AI-written book? An author set up an experiment to find out. – Vox

Plagiarism of ideas in the age of generative artificial intelligence - Nature

AI Can Improve Scholarly Writing — If We Use It Right – Chronicle of Higher Ed

The AI Power of Suggestion

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A.I. interaction can narrow ideas is through the power of suggestion. Once a chatbot suggests a direction, humans tend to lock in on it. The conversational nature of A.I. can make it difficult to distinguish where the user’s thinking ends and the bot’s begins, making it effortless for people to adopt A.I.-generated perspectives as their own. It’s easy to see how an impressionable teenager could forgo writing the unconventional essay in favor of whatever A.I. suggests. -Rebecca Winthrop writing in The New York Times

AI ID's Anonymous Writing

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An advanced AI model correctly identified a writer as the author of a 1,000-word scene from an unpublished novel. I tried Claude on the first chapter of a romance novel that I started almost 20 years ago. (It identified me after only) a few seconds.  I fed Claude a different opening chapter from an unpublished science fiction novel I started right before the pandemic. Claude needed only 1,132 words to identify the author. -Megan McArdle writing in The Washington Post

27 Articles about AI & Writing

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Is It Wrong to Write a Book with A.I.? – New Yorker

This Is How To Tell if Writing Was Made by AI (video) – Bloomberg

Artificial intelligence helps you work harder, instead of just outsourcing your brain. - Washington Post

New York Times Cuts Ties With Book Review Writer Over AI Use – The Wrap

Using AI makes writing more bland, study finds – NBC News

College students are writing with AI – but a pilot study finds they’re not simply letting it write for them – The Conversation

Wikipedia Bans AI-Generated Content – 404 Media  

A Fortune editor has cranked out more than 600 stories using AI – Wall Street Journal

AI autocomplete doesn’t just change how you write. It changes how you think – Scientific American

A.I. Is Writing Fiction. Publishers Are Unprepared. – New York Times

AI tool flags plagiarism in 95% of Ph.D. theses submitted this year at India university. – Times of India

Horror Novel ‘Shy Girl’ Canceled Over Suspected A.I. Use - New York Times

Writing Faculty Push for the Right to Refuse AI – Inside Higher Ed

Grammarly pulls AI author-impersonation tool after backlash – BBC  

In some classrooms, teachers ask: Can AI teach students to write better? – Washington Post

1 year, 1 publisher, 9,000 books: AI-generated titles flood Korean shelves – Korea Times

In some classrooms, teachers ask: Can AI teach students to write better? - Washington Post

Can we use AI for academic writing? It depends – Times Higher Ed

How AI slop is causing a crisis in computer science – Nature

A judge in New Zealand questioned the remorse of a defendant who had used A.I. to write apologies to victims and the court. - New York Times  

Major conference catches illicit AI use — and rejects hundreds of papers - Nature

Senior European journalist suspended for publishing AI-generated quotes – EuroNews

Why artificial intelligence detectors could penalize academic writing - Nature

Pangram said three of my writers produced ‘AI-generated’ articles. That didn’t hold up. - Wall Street Journal

I’m a college admissions counselor. I’ve changed my mind about students using ChatGPT – San Francisco Chronicle

I wrote a novel using AI. Writers must accept artificial intelligence – but we are as valuable as ever – The Guardian  

Don't Let AI Write the Story of Your Life – Psychology Today

Making us Average

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A.I. is a technology of averages: large language models are trained to spot patterns across vast tracts of data; the answers they produce tend toward consensus, both in the quality of the writing, which is often riddled with clichés and banalities, and in the caliber of the ideas. Other, older technologies have aided and perhaps enfeebled writers, of course—one could say the same about, say, SparkNotes or a computer keyboard. But with A.I. we’re so thoroughly able to outsource our thinking that it makes us more average, too. - Kyle Chayka writing in the New Yorker

Generative AI Doesn't Know How to Write Suspense

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Suspense, in some form, is what keeps people watching anything longer than a TikTok clip, and it’s where A.I. flounders. A writer, uniquely, can juggle the big picture and the small one, shift between the 30,000-foot view and the three-foot view, build an emotional arc across multiple acts, plant premonitory details that pay off only much later and track what the audience knows against what the characters know. A recent study found that large language models simply couldn’t tell how suspenseful readers would find a piece of writing. -New York Times

Studying AI Writing

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Just as young artists learn to paint by copying masterpieces in museums, students might learn to write better by copying good writing. One researcher suggests that students ask ChatGPT to write a sample essay that meets their teacher’s assignment and grading criteria. The next step is key. If students pretend it’s their own piece and submit it, that’s cheating. They’ve also offloaded cognitive work to technology and haven’t learned anything. But the AI essay can be an effective teaching tool, in theory, if students study the arguments, organizational structure, sentence construction and vocabulary before writing a new draft in their own words. -Hechinger Report

AI Writing Feedback

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Students would generally learn more if they wrote a first draft on their own. With some prompting, a chatbot could then provide immediate writing feedback targeted to each students’ needs. In surveys, students with AI feedback said they felt more motivated to rewrite than those who didn’t get feedback. That motivation is critical. Often students aren’t in the mood to rewrite, and without revisions, students can’t become better writers. It’s unclear how many rounds of AI feedback it would take to boost a student’s writing skills more permanently, not just help revise the essay at hand. Studies (have found) that delaying AI a bit, after some initial thinking and drafting, could be a sweet spot in learning. -Hechinger Report

An electric charge in words

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The poet W. S. Merwin once said that you know you are writing a poem when a “sequence of words starts giving off what you might describe as a kind of electric charge.” I’ve been thinking about how to place the sort of liveness Merwin describes—the sense of your body as a living circuit that the poem moves through—in a world filling up with noise, marred by misdirection and distraction. When, how, and why do we make room for the miraculous? From moment to moment. In any way we can. Because it is part of the practice of being human. -Joshua Bennett is the Distinguished Chair of the Humanities and a literature professor at MIT writing in The Atlantic

Using AI to Flesh Out Half-Baked Ideas

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I’ve always found it easier to work out my ideas through dialogue, but not many people are interested in hearing my half-baked ideas. That is why I’ve found that talking through ideas is one of the best uses of AI for writers. NotebookLM takes the idea of talking to the archive to the next level: The archive you chat with is one you assemble yourself with sources for a particular project, which the AI can also help you collect to get started. -Jonathan D. Fitzgerald on Mashable 

The fear that AI will Flatten Everything

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I understand the fear that AI will flatten everything — our voices, our culture, even our humanity. It’s a genuine concern. When algorithms prioritize patterns over personality, the result can be unnervingly uniform. Language becomes smooth but soulless. Distinctiveness gets edited out. And yet — I don’t believe the story ends there. History tells us something else: that when more people can express themselves, culture expands. The spectrum widens. And over time, we find new ways to value voice, not just polish. Yes, we’ll have to work harder to preserve individuality. To notice when we’re defaulting to the safe or generic. -Youjin Nam writing in Medium

For the Scholarly Elite or the Masses?

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In college and graduate school, I studied cognitive science, philosophy, and politics. I formed a conviction that I wanted to try to change the world for the better. Initially, my plan was to be an academic and public intellectual. At the time, I got bored easily (still do), which made me distractible and not great at making the trains run on time. Academia seemed like an environment that would keep me perpetually stimulated as I would think and write on the value of compassion, self-development, and the pursuit of wisdom. I would hopefully inspire others to implement these ideas to form a nobler society.

But graduate school, while stimulating, turned out to be grounded in a culture and incentive scheme that promoted hyperspecialization; I discovered that academics end up writing for a scholarly elite of typically about fifty people. It turned out there was not much support for academics who would attempt to spread ideas to the masses. So my aspiration to have a broad impact on potentially millions of people clashed with the market realities of academia. 

I adopted my career orientation. My new aim was to try to promote the workings of a good society via entrepreneurship and technology.

Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha, The Startup of You

Grammarly Offering Authorship Tool

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Grammarly has created a new authorship tool. It tracks the writing process, showing where text is typed into a document or pasted, as well as which parts of a document are created or modified with AI. When the paper is complete, a report is generated, which students can show teachers if there is any question about the source of their work. -Wall Street Journal 

Emotional Support Punctuation

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“The em dash is such a powerful writing tool that also carries great subtlety to it,” said Aileen Gallagher, a journalism professor at Syracuse University. “The idea that it is an indicator of soulless, dead AI-generated writing is really upsetting to me. Moniza Hossain, a children’s author based in Britain, called the em dash her “emotional support punctuation mark.” -Washington Post