I'm Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown.

Over the past few months, I've found myself answering a lot of questions about AI.

My most recent book, Dear Writer, is a craft book about creativity in general and writing specifically,

so it wasn't an unforeseen line of questioning.

On podcasts and during audience Q&As after events, plenty of people wanted to know what I thought

about the rise of artificial intelligence. As you might imagine, I am deeply concerned about the

increasing use of AI in the classroom. Many of my friends who are writers are also teachers.

Many teach college or graduate school, and others teach high school. What I hear from these friends

is that having to police students' use of AI on what should be original work has taken a lot

of the joy out of classroom teaching. Writing is thinking on the page.

If you're using artificial intelligence to write essays, poems, and stories, you're outsourcing

your thinking.

What I want as a reader and as a teacher is a different kind of AI, authentic intelligence, by which I mean genuine human intelligence.

We can do things that generative AI cannot do because we have experiences that AI cannot have.

We can dream and imagine.

We can second-guess ourselves, doubt, regret.

We can hope and grieve.

Authentic intelligence is also emotional intelligence.

Humans have a point of view because of what we've been through on this planet,

and because of our relationships with others.

I want to read writing from that place.

The poems I admire most and hold dear are the poems behind which I can sense a real human

...