How To Win The AI War On Writing

AI is ruining English class for our kids. Here's how we fight back.

AI is ruining English class as we know it. Teachers are quitting, students are cheating, and overall performance is down. But AI itself is not the problem. In fact, when used correctly (or, as people like to say, “ethically”), AI could be one of the best things to ever happen to writing education. It might just elicit a writing renaissance, bringing great writing — and I mean, really great writing, the kind of juicy prose and delicious ideas that burst across your intellectual taste buds like a ripe summer peach — back into education.

Because let’s be honest. It’s way overdue.

Many educators, politicians, and tech bros alike think AI will give writers the boot. Thanks for your time as a writer! Happy career-hunting! But I say the opposite. AI will not make great writing obsolete. It will make it necessary. It will put it on the map.

Today’s writing education mostly sucks (sorry)

Writing has a notoriously terrible reputation in school. Remember the five-paragraph essay? My guess is these five paragraphs are where the initial joy of writing is often laid to rest. If we’re being honest, English class teaches you how to make your writing as boring as possible. It’s like a graveyard for play and experimentation. Students who do enjoy writing most likely do so because they enjoy reading: a novel hidden inside a textbook, a memoir devoured in the carpool line. They love writing despite English class, not because of it.

Unfortunately, this boring, formulaic way of writing does not leave us in childhood. It haunts us into adulthood — specifically, the workplace. Our Slack messages and email threads sag beneath the weight of the same ole’ tired cliches. Most press releases and product announcements have all the flavor of an unseasoned chicken breast. This isn’t a knock against writers, but a testament to how traditional writing education falls short. Boring English class leads to adults who struggle to communicate anything that isn’t steeped in stuffy professionalism. No wonder AI is posing such a threat. (Who does stuffy professionalism better than ChatGPT?)

Here’s why this matters. In our hyper-digital age, writing is how we communicate: texting, Tweeting, emailing, blogging, marketing — the written word is how we share our ideas with the world. (And, how we discover new ones.) If future generations want their ideas to rise above AI-generated content, then kids need to learn two things:

1. How to write well without AI

2. And how to write well with AI.

The combination of the two could lead to the greatest writing renaissance we’ve ever seen.

Writing well without AI

Never in the history of the world has there been a demand for great writing. A desire, sure. But not a demand. Until now.

Did you know that nearly half of Medium’s articles are AI-generated? That over half of LinkedIn posts are AI-generated? ChatGPT is eating up Internet real-estate for mediocre writing. If kids grow up to be not-so-great writers, then yes, AI will probably steal their lunch money. But if kids grow into skilled writers — much less exceptional ones — people will clamber to read their work, bask in their prose, and drink in their ideas. There is only so much intellectual slop cobbled together by an LLM that people can consume before it simply becomes mind-numbing, soul-dampening white noise. AI-generated content is just a caricature of human craftsmanship, like looking at a photograph of someone versus seeing them face-to-face. It leaves readers hungry for the real thing: gooey, delicious, maximalist writing.

Maximalist writing oozes flavor. It is rich, nuanced, and deeply expressive. It doesn’t just convey information, but evokes emotion. Maximalist writing is as textured as a Monet, as zesty as your favorite Siete seasoning. It tells stories. It creates an experience. Most importantly, it is unapologetically original. This is what readers crave against a backdrop of AI content.

In the words of writer David Perell:

“...an edge exists for people who can write in a maximalist style. With vibe, voice, flair, variance, and personality as if you’re dialing up the saturation on your writing.”

Think of all the writers you love, and all the reasons you love them. Can AI replace the unhinged wit of Tim Urban? The biting intimacy of Toni Morrison? The whimsy of Dr. Seuss? The lush, dreamlike prose of Gabriel García Márquez? Maximalism celebrates the distinctive thumbprint of the writer. This should be the goal of modern writing education: to help kids get their personality on the page, develop a distinctive style, and learn how to spread their ideas with flair.

All of this to say, writing well has never mattered more. And for our kids, it’s more than just developing an “interesting writing style.” It’s about developing legitimate mental models and learning how to think properly.

This is where writing well with AI comes in.

Writing well with AI

Much of what we read today is only a summary. Just open X. What do you see?

• “32 Things I Learned in 32 Years of Life.”

• “Five Morning Routines That Guarantee Success In One Hour or Less.”

• “Everything You Need to Know About Gut Health in 60 Seconds.”

Summary is helpful. Summary has its time and place. But too much summary, and we start losing things along the way: detail, nuance, meaning. Like grating a sturdy hunk of parmesan reggiano, we start shaving ideas down into small slivers, just mere parts of themselves.

In his essays AI’s Big Gift to Society Is…Pithy Summaries? and Resist Summary, Simon Sarris warns against the dangers of over summarization, from simple reading pleasure….

“You cannot read a summary of Anna Karenina and somehow stockpile its pleasures and charms.”

…to critical brain development:

“The nature of the output, of summary, is to speed things along. But the consequence is to avoid you having to build your own complex mental model of anything.”

Writing is thinking. It’s why therapists tell you to journal, how CEO’s draft new pitches for their shareholders, how Taylor Swift processes her ex-boyfriends’ mistakes. Writing is not the process of transcribing thoughts already present in your conscious mind. Instead, it is the process of actively unearthing thoughts, sifting through the soil of your subconscious like an archaeological dig.

Wrongful use of AI disrupts this process. When kids prompt AI to write their essay for English class, there is little to no critical thinking involved. It’s what Ted Chiang calls “bringing a forklift into the weight room to do all the heavy lifting.” Kids aren’t learning, nor are they building the mental models necessary to learn. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Not all AI tools exist to disrupt the great archaeological dig. Instead, they can simply be the reason we no longer have to dig with our hands.

Your very first hire…

Lex founder Nathan Baschez says the most ethical way to use AI is to “use it like you’re hiring someone,” and I couldn’t agree more. An editor with two decades-worth of experience. A hyper-caffeinated research assistant. An intellectual sparring partner for half-baked ideas. All you writers out there are thinking the same thing: I’ll take one of each, please. This is where AI can add serious value.

Before kids can “make their first hire,” they need to learn the basics of meaningful writing in the age of AI, of which there are roughly four:

1. Agency
   Students need to make their own decisions. They don’t tell ChatGPT to “Pick a topic and write an essay for my English class,” but, “Here’s the topic I want to write about. Make your strongest case against this argument, and let’s debate.”

2. Engagement
   Students need to create writing that connects with real-world applications and collaboration. Instead of writing a five-paragraph essay that no one but the teacher will read, students could collaborate with AI to write a short story and submit it to a writing contest, or use AI to help refine a persuasive speech when they’re running for class president.

3. Transfer
   Students need to connect new knowledge to prior understanding. For example, after studying logical fallacies, they could use AI to fact-check a politician’s speech and write an analysis.

4. Reflection
   Real learning isn’t just about getting the right answer. It's about thinking, questioning, making connections. After writing an essay with AI assistance, a student should ask:

• “Which ideas were truly mine, and where did AI just fill in the gaps?”

• “Did AI’s suggestions challenge me or just make the process easier?”

• “How would I defend this argument in a conversation without AI?”

• “What did I learn that I can apply to my next piece of writing?”

Like a calculator in math class or a shovel in dirt, AI is simply a means for getting to success faster.

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The days of stuffy writing education are over. Exceptional writing, steeped in human distinctiveness, is the antidote to AI-driven mediocrity.

If future generations want to stand out with their ideas, then they need — yes, need — to learn how to translate their individualism into gooey, delicious, maximalist writing, the kind that sticks to your subconscious like peanut butter to the roof of your mouth. That’s when they can use AI to write faster, write better, and distribute their ideas to the far corners of the Internet.

This is how we win the AI war on writing.