I started publishing my essays on the Internet in 2007. Since I started, I haven’t missed a single day, though there have been plenty of days when my entry was completed and published late for a wide variety of reasons. I confess that I have also, on occasion, pre-written my essay the night before and published it after midnight to have it “date stamped” on the appropriate day. More often, I have been uninspired and struggled with a topic for a journal entry and ended up writing on a topic that is repetitive or boring. I sometimes fear that too many of my entries sound exactly like too many other entries.

The discipline has been very good for me. Since there is no income generated by my web site and it costs to maintain the web site, it should be obvious that I don’t do this for money. I’m not making any from the activity. My motivation is mainly emotional and spiritual. I began keeping a journal as a spiritual discipline. Publishing the journal has created just the right amount of discipline for me. I could simply stop publishing. I could change my publication schedule. I’ve noticed that there are plenty of successful bloggers who don’t write daily. Some only write one or two entries per month. I choose to write and publish the way i do because it is meaningful for me.

It is possible, however, that my way of writing will one day become as obsolete as the typewriter is today. Expanding research into artificial intelligence (AI) has produced a number of commercially available products that write essays for you. One product, Jasper, calls itself “an AI writing tool with the power to write essays for you.” One version of the program includes a blog post creator that writes and publishes blog posts with just a few questions or words to indicate topic and tone.

These programs are obviously marketed to students. Several specifically mention the program’s ability to write research papers for students. They “help you decide on your thesis, collect your research, and help you through the paper writing process. They also are designed to specifically avoid any charges of plagiarism. Some of these programs have names that show their intent to replace hard work and discipline for students. “My Assignment Help Essay Typer,” and “Paper Typer” are names of some of the programs.

When I was in college, I knew that there were some students who hired others to type papers for them. The service was, I believe, mostly limited to simply typing. The student would do the research and hand write the paper. The typist would format and type the paper for submission. I have since learned that there are essay writing services that charge a hefty fee to write essays for students. Since financial issues are a leading cause of dropping out of higher education, it seems that there is a class distinction between those who can hire others to do the work for them and those who cannot. In the long run, those who do not will gain more from their college experience than those who hire others to do the work.

Yesterday I had a conversation with a University Professor who had tried out one of the essay writing programs. He reported it as “frightening.” He said that within 5 minutes the program had produced an essay that he would give an “A” grade had it been submitted by a student. Unlike software designed to detect plagiarism, there is no way to detect the use of these AI-based tools. It is easy to imagine students who are awarded good grades without doing the work required to actually learn a useful skill.

Computers have already fundamentally changed higher education. During my career as a student, we conducted research in libraries land were, for the most part, limited to the collections of university libraries. Of course we also designed surveys, studies, and other ways of gathering information from the field, but our primary research into the literature on our topic was conducted at the library. Then we typed a draft of our thesis, edited and revised it, and re-typed it. It was submitted to peer review, revised and retyped before being submitted as a final project. It wasn’t unusual for a student to have typed the same paper multiple times before it was finally submitted. On some of my projects, I did a literal “cut and paste,” cutting up typed pages to rearrange the paragraphs before retyping the paper. As a result, when theses were submitted for degrees, students knew the content of their papers thoroughly. If you type a paper over and over, you become familiar with its contents. When they defended their theses, they knew exactly what they were defending. Computers eliminated the need to retype anything. Theses are still reviewed, edited, and revised, but the process eliminates repeated entry of the material.

There is a problem in this. Repetition is a very effective teacher. Eliminating repetition removes part of the learning process. Examining committees began to notice that students were coming in to defend theses and were surprisingly unfamiliar with what they had written. The writing process occurred in phases and stages spread out over several months and students literally lost sight of the content of the entire project. Sometimes examiners were more familiar with the thesis than the student simply because they had read it more recently.

My professor friend and I agreed that we are less than enthusiastic about the new AI writing assistants. However, it seems inevitable that students will continue to have increasing access to such tools. There might be some way to craft assignments that require students to go through a learning process just to start the essays or ask the right questions of the AI software, and I admit that I am intrigued by the challenge of trying to come up with assignments that challenge the software. In my imagination, I think it is possible to thwart the software and come up with an assignment that requires the student to learn new concepts and skills rather than simply manipulate a device. But the truth is that students who have grown up with computers and screened devices will always be more technologically competent than I. They will stay several steps ahead of me.

I just hope they learn something in the process.

In the meantime, I’m writing these essays the old fashioned way. I feel no need for an AI essay writer.