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I knew my writing students were using AI. Their confessions led to a powerful teaching moment (The Guardian, 5/10/26)
This is from Micah Nathan, "a novelist, essayist and MIT lecturer in fiction and nonfiction writing whose books include Gods of Aberdeen and Losing Graceland."
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/may/10/fiction-writing-professor-ai
AI’s prose is perfectly mediocre, producing the sort of inert gloss that reads like a Frankensteinian amalgam of MFA-workshopped writing, an unintentional parody of the style it mimics. The resultant stories and essays are simulacra of thought, generated via pattern recognition learned from millions of human-penned words, rooted in no particular experience by no particular person. AI writing reminds me of Tennyson’s description of the beautiful Maud in the titular poem:
Faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null
Dead perfection; no more
Insightful readers feel that emptiness even if they can’t articulate it. They sense that the body moves without a brain. By contrast, student-written fiction is gloriously flawed, a struggle on the page between what the author is trying to say and what’s actually being said. The prose stumbles in a way reminiscent of a foal learning how to walk: even in their trembling legs I see hints of future grace. Such clumsiness is necessary; its absence would be proof of the foal never having learned to walk.
-snip-
The conversation that followed their confessions was one of the most productive teaching moments of my eight years at MIT. Writing, I told them, isn’t supposed to be easy, and of course it can be tedious but that doesn’t make it rote. Writing isn’t just the production of sentences – it’s the training of endurance by way of sustained attention. It’s a way of learning what one thinks by attempting to say it. An LLM can reproduce the appearance of that activity, but it can’t replace it, because the value lies not only in the object produced but in the transformation that occurs during its making.
-snip-
Since that night, our workshops have changed in ways I didn’t anticipate. We talk more openly about frustration, about the moments when a draft resists its own author. I still teach craft – form, structure, revision – but find myself returning to the tension between thought and language, the stories where abstraction refuses to take shape. We discuss why their thinking matters, that their struggle to translate thoughts into word isn’t evidence of failure, but a sign of growth. Even when, and especially when, words fail. What my students and I now guard isn’t a boundary against machines so much as a sanctuary for authorship, a place where everything on the page and not yet on the page belongs to an actual person.
Faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null
Dead perfection; no more
Insightful readers feel that emptiness even if they can’t articulate it. They sense that the body moves without a brain. By contrast, student-written fiction is gloriously flawed, a struggle on the page between what the author is trying to say and what’s actually being said. The prose stumbles in a way reminiscent of a foal learning how to walk: even in their trembling legs I see hints of future grace. Such clumsiness is necessary; its absence would be proof of the foal never having learned to walk.
-snip-
The conversation that followed their confessions was one of the most productive teaching moments of my eight years at MIT. Writing, I told them, isn’t supposed to be easy, and of course it can be tedious but that doesn’t make it rote. Writing isn’t just the production of sentences – it’s the training of endurance by way of sustained attention. It’s a way of learning what one thinks by attempting to say it. An LLM can reproduce the appearance of that activity, but it can’t replace it, because the value lies not only in the object produced but in the transformation that occurs during its making.
-snip-
Since that night, our workshops have changed in ways I didn’t anticipate. We talk more openly about frustration, about the moments when a draft resists its own author. I still teach craft – form, structure, revision – but find myself returning to the tension between thought and language, the stories where abstraction refuses to take shape. We discuss why their thinking matters, that their struggle to translate thoughts into word isn’t evidence of failure, but a sign of growth. Even when, and especially when, words fail. What my students and I now guard isn’t a boundary against machines so much as a sanctuary for authorship, a place where everything on the page and not yet on the page belongs to an actual person.
Much more at the link - and IMO this is the best piece I've run across yet on how someone teaching writing should deal with students tempted to use AI.
I'll admit my experience of fiction-writing classes and workshopping is limited to only 1 fiction-writing course in college where I cut over half the classes. The teacher wanted some of the stories (not all) read aloud. He wanted the class to analyze and comment on what he considered the best and the worst. I saw just one example of knives out for a poor student whose story that tenured professor didn't like - most of the time he let students do the critiquing - and after that I skipped as many classes as possible, showing up to get the next assignment, when he would tell me to read the last story I'd turned in, which I didn't like doing, either. He gave me an A on every story but a B for the class (pissing me off because it lowered my grade average). Years later when we were both with friends drinking at a bar near the campus, I heard him announce loudly and drunkenly that "all male writers are bastards, and all female writers are bitches." Which I thought explained why he'd been willing to target some students whose stories he didn't like for very harsh criticism via their classmates. I also knew by then that he'd worked as an editor in NYC for years before turning to teaching, and I guessed after hearing that bitter remark that his bad relationships with writers were why he'd made the switch. He could bully - or try to bully - students. It was less likely to have worked for him with professional writers.
Micah Nathan is a much better teacher. He really does make his classroom "a sanctuary for authorship." He let his students talk about various reasons they might choose to have AI write for them, and then he explained why it was still best not to use AI.
More students spoke: one wanted to know how using AI was any different from using a human editor.
That made me laugh because of a personal memory of a journalism major I was trying to help who made lots of spelling errors he simply didn't bother to correct. This was back in the olden days before spell checkers and autocorrect. He explained to me that correcting those errors was "the editor's job" - using a tone I'd probably describe as mansplaining today. I explained to him, as patiently as I could, that while editors might be forgiving of established writers occasionally submitting what looked like unusually sloppy work, until he reached that point he'd actually be judged by what was already on the page, and editors might not get past an error-filled first page before rejecting it. I hope he understood that, if he continued with the journalism major.
And I hope students eventually understand why using AI is a bad idea.
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