I quit teaching because of ChatGPT

THIS FALL IS THE FIRST IN NEARLY 20 YEARS THAT I AM not returning to the classroom.

- VICTORIA LIVINGSTONE

For most of my career, I taught writing, literature, and language, primarily to university students. I quit, in large part, because of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT.

Virtually all experienced scholars know that writing, as historian Lynn Hunt has argued, is "not the transcription of thoughts already consciously present in [the writer's] mind." Rather, writing is a process closely tied to thinking. In graduate school, I spent months trying to fit pieces of my dissertation together in my mind and eventually found I could solve the puzzle only through writing. Writing is hard work. It is sometimes frightening. With the temptation of AI, many possibly most-of my students were no longer inclined to face this challenge.