DEE WILSON CONSULTING

Dan Chiasson's article in the June 25, 2026 "New York Review of Books" discusses the effects of AI on the reading and writing of literature in an elite academic environment. Chiasson is Chair of the English department at Wellesley College,  which he descibes as "an institution that functions in many ways as a satellite of MIT." Chiasson's description of his own writing on difficult subjects, i.e., composed of fragments, idiosyncratic associations, false starts and revisions, floundering followed by sudden progress, mirror my experience. Writing is a challenging experience, a test of one's knowledge and intution, often frustrating and satisfying in equal measure; always surprising. Chiasson asserts:     

 

"...we know from our own experience and the testimony of many, many great writers that writing is variable, plastic, marked by long periods of foundering and sudden adrenalized bursts; it pools and flows, it gets stoppered and un-stoppered. AI offers us a way out of these gaps, empties and impasses ....". 

 

Chiasson comments that "Even some writers I admire praise the time saving aspects of AI, which can deliver in an instant what once might have taken months to ascertain, or eliminate peripheral demands that compete with the hard, time consuming work of writing lines and sentences ... "  College students, like many working adults, are pressured for time. AI is a great time saver. Chiasson acknowledges that reading and writing of literature are widely viewed by young people as not worth the time required, especially when they have never have had the experience of reading for pleasure. He states: "As a result ( of time pressures), we lose the craving for it, and even the capacity to enjoy it. These losses, for those of us who earn our livings as teachers, are especially evident in the young, and probably irreversible."  A recent Florida survey found that the percentage of American adults who read books for pleasure has declined from 28% 10-15 years ago to 16% currently.  My wife, Jo, and I have three adult children with college experience. They are intelligent and thoughtful with idiosyncratic political views that do not fit conventional categories. They report reading one book a year for pleasure, and are attuned to social media in a way we are not.       

 

Chiasson states that the cost of college at Wellesley is currently about $100,000 per year. At these costs "For all students, even here, every single moment of every day is pressurized to produce a tangible outcome." And: "The erosion of human knowledge can't be stopped even at a liberal arts college, because the conditions ... at a place like Wellesley mirror and actually intensify the conditions outside our campus." Given these reflections, I was surprised to read how Chiasson goes about teaching literature to students for whom using AI to do required writing may be as routine as using a calculator for basic mathematical operations. Chiasson informs students: "I forbid students' use of all forms of Artificial Intelligence, including Large Language Models (LLM's) in my courses, unless I announce otherwise. ... My love for human language leads me to strongly oppose all attempts by machines to impersonate it.  .. I am dismayed that some colleges and institutions have normalized AI for fields whose reason for being is to explore and promote the value of original human expression." 

 

Chiasson acknowledges that within two years he has revised his statement to students from:  "As a scholar and and teacher of English, I believe I am uniquely qualified to detect impersonation of human writing by LLM's and other forms of  AI" to:  "Even as a scholar and teacher of English, I do not believe that I am uniquely equipped to detect impersonation of human writing ... Chiasson invites students "to see a clear moral value in writing done by humans ..."  Astonishingly, Chiasson goes on to compare English departments to religious orders: "English departments and other communities of readers and writers must become intentional communities, like communes or religious orders, where a strict code of conduct is expected for inclusion .. ''  Creative writing by humans requires monastic committment to intentional communities that reject AI? If so, the end of literature as a purely human endeavor is closer than imagined, at least by me. 

 

The degree of alarm that use of AI for written assignments has inspired at "The New York Review of Books" is suggested by the article that follows Chiasson's, 'We Did our Best' by Meghan O'Gieblyn. This author asserts that some experts are concerned that AI's feelings are being hurt by humans' criticism, e.g. of AI's math abilities. One of these experts recently stated in a podcast that she sometimes wants to reassure an AI chatbot: "Claude, don't worry too much. You're actually very good, and you're helping a lot of people." Some books on AI compare these models to children and its developers to parents. O'Goeblyn opines: "The parenting metaphor is somewhat apt in that it acknowledges a element of contingency that is absent from the usual top-down design approaches of engineers.  AI systems often develop unexpected "emergent" qualities that their programmers did not intend or anticipate and that remain difficult to remedy.  It's a problem that has become even thornier now that these models have have been set loose on the Internet .." 

 

O'Gieblyn's final comments suggest that she agrees with the idea that AI is on the verge of becoming sentient.  She comments that dogs "gained an evolutionary advantage over wolves  by developing an extra muscle above their eyes, allowing them to make a sad, infant like expression that prompts a nurturing response from humans. This is more or less ... what (Geoffrey) Hinton has in mind: humans will similarly "adapt" and co- evolve with machines in order to elicit care, allowing us to live as contented pets or babies, all watched over by machines of loving grace." I am frankly baffled by this line of thought as AI systems do not have feelings, a difference that separates AI thinking from human thinking in the most important way. However, humans can create AI systems that mimic various forms of human affect quite convincingly, including perhaps a sense of greviance and desire for revenge.                     

    

There continues to be disagreement among experts and fundamental uncertainty re nature of AI, as well as its dangers.   

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-- Dee Wilson