AI invites us to craft new metaphors. Here’s one from Sidney Dobrin’s short book AI and Writing (2023): when faced with the task of summiting the mountain, you can climb it, or you can take a helicopter to the top. You can write the essay, or you can use AI as a tool for brainstorming and writing. Each strategy offers different rewards, risks, and costs under different circumstances.
Another metaphor came up during our recent UMB faculty & staff book club on AI and Writing. Not long ago, we navigated using maps (and then, instructions jotted down from Mapquest). Now, many of us rely on Google or Apple Maps as a second brain to navigate the world. When I’m familiar with an area, Maps helps me drive more efficiently. It offers several routes, and I choose the best one based on my own local knowledge. But when I’m in a new place and Maps gives me bad advice, I follow right along and regret it later.
So, too, with AI. If we don’t know how to evaluate AI-generated text against our own standards for audience awareness, disciplinary norms, conscious language, and style, we’re taking a backseat. Dobrin’s student-friendly book offers many of these thought experiments and applications. I appreciate that it ends on a note about the human and environmental costs behind every AI query.