Ship of Fools

The OU essay controversy is bleakly prophetic about what AI writing means for the future of thought.

In December, following investigation, the University of Oklahoma stripped teaching duties from Mel Curth, the graduate instructor who failed junior psychology major Samantha Fulnecky’s essay about the Bible’s prescriptions of gender roles and how, in Fulnecky’s view, those prescriptions are reason enough for psychologists to ignore the bullying of gender-nonconforming children. Folks have had many opinions — some well-considered, others not so much — about whether this was indeed a case of religious discrimination, as Fulnecky claims it was.

I’ll only glancingly litigate that question here. I’m no authority on it. But I’ve taught college-level writing at three institutions of higher education, so I feel I have standing to talk about this aspect of the controversy.

What’s more, I think what played out at OU offers us a dystopian vision of the future. I’m thinking of what widespread adoption of writing by large language models (LLMs) presages for the future of thought.¹ If the controversy is as prophetic as I believe, the prophecy is as bleak as Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of dry bones — except, I fear, this time no god will show up to restore flesh to the bones and breathe life into an army of the intellectually dead. Or, more likely, we’ll be appalled by the gods we get.

Before someone gets the wrong idea, let me clarify I’m not accusing Fulnecky of using AI to write her reaction essay. It’s plain she wrote it herself. Oh, is it ever plain!

For instance, it contains a glaring contradiction about its key idea that I’d expect of an undergrad. In the first paragraph, Fulnecky says, “Gender roles and tendencies should not be considered ‘stereotypes.’” In the second paragraph, though, she argues, “It is perfectly normal for kids to follow gender ‘stereotypes’ because that is how God made us.” A bit later, she appears to accept that gender roles are stereotypic: “If leaning into that role means I am ‘following gender stereotypes’ then I am happy to be following a stereotype that aligns with the gifts and abilities God gave me as a woman.” Well, are they stereotypes or not? Fulnecky doesn’t seem to know.

Caught up in religious fervor, she has leapfrogged over defining “stereotype,” which would be a crucial step in arguing against considering “gender roles and tendencies” to be stereotypes, in order to land on the word’s connotations and its place in a culture war. It’s a significant hole in her argument, as written. It’s not impossible at all to fill the hole, but Fulnecky gave filling it no thought.

And that — the lack of thought — is my concern. The very first sentence reads: “This article was very thought provoking and caused me to thoroughly evaluate the idea of gender and the role it plays in our society.” But given the essay’s content — its ideas, its single source (the Bible), and its refusal to engage substantively with the scholarly work to which it’s supposed to react — this first sentence is just a lie. If Fulnecky read the article in full (an interview she gave suggests she only read its abstract), reading it didn’t cause her to think about much of anything, much less “to thoroughly evaluate the idea of gender and the role it plays in our society.”

Quite the opposite! Her essay is only a recital of the ideas about gender she received from her religious upbringing. She didn’t invest a moment of actual thought; she just parroted some received ideas.

The problem wasn’t that Fulnecky had received religious ideas — virtually all students do, in my experience — or even that she gave voice to them. The problem was that the essay isn’t academic in its approach to the topic. That’s the crux of Curth’s criticism of it, for instance the objection that it cites no scholarly sources to make its claims. From a teacher’s point of view, Fulnecky just didn’t engage in the field of study, psychology, to examine any ideas, either her own or those in the article she reacted to. She treated her psychology class as if it was church and she was called upon to “witness” for God. She completely failed in her job as a student, which was to learn.²

Personally, I disagree with Curth’s decision to award Fulnecky no credit for her paper. I would’ve given her some credit, maybe 10 points out of the total of 25, for producing a paper that was at least on-topic. But I appreciate the point Curth was making with a 0 as well as the subsequent offer to let Fulnecky rewrite the paper for credit.

All the student was being asked to do was to engage in good faith in the course’s field of study. She wasn’t told to reject her religion or its ideas. She was free to believe what she wanted. But she wasn’t free, nor should a student be free, to make personal belief and only personal belief, nothing else, the benchmark for judgments in her academic writing about the ideas in psychology.

If a practitioner of a scientific discipline behaved as Fulnecky did, they’d be hounded out of the field by their peers, rightly so. And, of course, the entire point of studying a discipline — of being a student — is to become a practitioner of the discipline. So, the discipline’s standards apply as much to its students as they do to masters. They must apply, or else the students will never become masters.

Afterward, stirring up a stink in public about her failing grade, Fulnecky made it clear she doesn’t feel her job as a student is to learn. She’s there to have her preconceptions and beliefs coddled — anything less is discriminatory.

Now, caving to political pressure and dismissing Curth from teaching, the university has endorsed Fulnecky’s view of the job all of its students have in the classroom.

Students aren’t there to learn. If anyone’s learning anything, it’s the teachers. Students are there to have trifling encounters with their fields of study, encounters bounded by each student’s personal system of belief, which is held sacrosanct. Beyond that, they’re just doing busywork for four years, walking across a stage, and collecting a diploma.

Then why attend college at all? What’s the point? Acquiring a piece of paper that only grows more worthless with every decline in academic standards?

Why even have a university?

What does this have to do with AI writing and the future of intellectualism, though? Of all the takes on the OU essay controversy, this one by Ana Marie Cox intrigued me the most as a writer:

An editor by instinct (like me), Cox picked up her red pen to mark up Fulnecky’s essay, which really needs an editor (or a writing tutor’s guidance, which Fulnecky could have gotten at the university’s writing lab). But Cox found herself foiled by the very spirit in which the essay was written. Finally, she realized, “You can’t make something better if the person who wrote it doesn’t want it to be better.”

“The inadequacy of the writing is the point,” Cox tells us. “Because this essay isn’t just an essay with ugly ideas. It’s an essay that rejects the idea of being good — that you need to try, that persuasion matters, that clarity matters, that craft matters. The real argument of this essay is that, as long as you have the power to enforce a belief, there’s no point in making something beautiful or even competent or coherent. You don’t have to convince anyone. You just have to make them accept it and call it good.”

A little clarification is wanted. Fulnecky believes the Bible’s prescriptions should rule academia — and society writ large — without justification. “Faith is the be-all-end-all” is the pivot for her worldview. So, for her, what’s “good” isn’t about what indicates an effort to learn or think — what’s persuasive, clear, and well-crafted. She likely took her best stab at writing something adequate for her purpose. The trouble arose from her mistaken notion of what a student’s purpose is in an academic setting. Her actions illustrate that her purpose was to assert her own “power to enforce a belief” and make people “accept it and call it good” without justifying it, the way a student — indeed a teacher too — would have to justify any other belief in academia.

From there, Cox delves into an analysis of the aesthetics of current American politics, the intentional ugliness of authoritarianism. I won’t unpack her analysis. That’s worth hearing in its original form. But she immediately made me think about two things.

The first is how the craft of writing is one way — and not an inconsiderable way — in which we develop and shape our ideas themselves.

For most people who haven’t made a deep study of writing, it’s usually assumed that a writer’s ideas are sitting fully formed in the writer’s mind and the crafting of the ideas in a piece of writing is only an effort to communicate them coherently and effectively. Well, craft is that effort, but not only that. In practice, attempting to get an idea across coherently and effectively forces the writer to probe the idea, to form it more fully, to alter and refine it, and sometimes even to abandon it.

So it should be no surprise that ugly, unexamined ideas are almost always expressed in ugly, unexamined writing.

Not only does the lack of craft in Fulnecky’s paper — how it rambles and repeats itself unnecessarily, how it unwittingly contradicts itself, how it mistakes the purpose of the assignment to be going on a rant rather than reflecting intellectually on another piece of writing³ — show what a paltry effort she put into conveying ideas, but the thinness of her ideas is also a product of her lack of attention to craft. She didn’t think through the organization or sophistication of what she wrote. She just “spilled” her thoughts. So, they came out poorly shaped and underdeveloped.

When merely “spilling” is the bar to which Fulnecky holds herself for conveying ideas, is it any wonder her warrant for them boils down to “the Bible says so, and I take what it says to be true as a matter of course”?⁴ And isn’t it rich that Fulnecky thinks, in the context of her psychology class, if her classmates are “trying to conform to the same mundane opinion,” that’s obviously a bad thing, but if kids bully each other to enforce conformity to stereotypes, that isn’t a problem at all?

Who’s really surprised to see such flimsy warrants and egregious contradictions in an essay this poorly written? When there are no standards for writing, why should there be standards for logic? Anything goes.

The second thing Cox’s analysis prompted me to think about is AI writing. And let me tell you, those were some dark and hopeless thoughts!

When writers hand over to AI the process of crafting ideas into a piece of writing, the assumption that their ideas are already fully formed and only need communicating — that grappling with craft contributes nothing to the formation of their ideas — is so pervasive that it becomes invisible to them. They don’t know what they’re missing. And how smart the writing AI produces sounds breeds an undue reverence for it, as if these not-writers can also assume the AI thinks about ideas the writing contains just as those ideas exist and function in reality.

In case anyone’s in doubt, no AI is capable of this. Only human beings can think of an idea as it exists and functions in the real human world, because only human beings live in the real human world. AIs don’t. They live, if you can call it that, in a world of pure logic and statistical probability.⁵ They live light-years from our frame of reference.

More than the flood of AI slop which is now threatening writers’ already precarious livelihoods, these terrible assumptions about both writing and AI are what bother me when folks argue “AI is just a tool.” By sheer dint of not practicing the craft of writing (or practicing it lackadaisically), these folks are blind to one of its cardinal virtues — namely, that it’s a testing ground for ideas. Need we remind them of the etymology of the word “essay,” which surely an English teacher told them at some point?

I shudder to imagine, along with the crafting of thoughts in language, how much of our thinking itself is being handed over to inhuman machines. Intellectually, society is already stretched thin. We’ve got more access to information than ever before, yet we find ourselves baffled at how to handle so much misinformation running rampant, a problem AI only amplifies. Now, to boot, we’re facing the prospect of a ship of fools sailing into port, totally unaware of how bad their ideas and beliefs are simply because they’ve passed up — and they continue to pass up — chances to wrestle with them.

What’s worse, because these fools will have grown used to being unreflective, just like Fulnecky has, their priority will be not justifying their ideas and beliefs — that is, the search for truth — but acquiring the power to enforce their ideas and beliefs, to make the rest of us accept them and call them good. Like Fulnecky, their intellectual project will be manufacturing deference to and legal enforcement for their viewpoints.

When we talk about religion, there’s a word for that: theocracy. In this case, we’re only talking about a theocracy where AIs are the gods.

For me at least (and I suspect it’s true of many people), the whole drama of writing is wrestling with ideas as I try to communicate them. What’s the best expression for this idea? How does the idea’s expression change it? Is it nearer or farther from the truth? Do I accept that “beauty is truth, truth beauty”? If I don’t accept it, then what balance must I strike between truth and beauty?

Without this drama, am I a writer? Without it, why be a writer?

Why even have writing?

1. For the rest of this essay, using the ever more common vernacular, I’ll refer to LLMs as “AI.” I realize LLMs are not the only type of artificial intelligence, but it’s beside the point here.

2. By academic standards, Fulnecky’s essay wouldn’t pass muster even in a theology class.

3. Signs that Fulnecky thought her purpose in writing was “going on a rant”:

• The first sentence of the second paragraph: “It is frustrating to me when I read articles like this and discussion posts from my classmates of so many people trying to conform to the same mundane opinion, so they do not step on people’s toes.” Fulnecky calls this presumed conformity “a cowardly and insincere way to live.” I call it presumed because at no point does she say how she’s gauging people’s motivations so generally. She’s just assuming everyone else is really as opposed to certain ideas as she is but she’s the only person with the chutzpah to let it be known.

• The entirety of the final paragraph, in which she talks about the wholly irrelevant topic of how she intends to raise her own children and prays that people won’t believe “the lies being spread from Satan.” Rants tend to build up to moral grandstanding.

4. I’ve heard one biblical scholar declare the book of Genesis doesn’t say what Fulnecky thinks it does when it calls woman “a helper for man.” Here’s the video containing that discussion.

5. This is why AIs are so much more adept than we are at solving problems in coding.