The Invention of Writing
21 Sep 2025Praise, condemnation, questions, and comments can be sent via email
This week I (likely) caught my students using AI to cheat on their assignments. I have to caveat that statement because I don’t have a smoking gun, like watching them type a prompt into their phone during a test. It’s entirely possible that my students actually did do the reading on Allan Buchanan, the philosopher, but during the quiz got confused and wrote their own thoughts in their own words on James Buchanan, the economist. Given that they had access to the writing prompt in advance, and that the writing prompt didn’t specify which Buchanan, and that Gemini responds about James Buchanan when given the prompt, I think this latter story unlikely.
I was never a perfect student in undergrad or high school, but I never cheated on assignments. I showed up to class hungover sometimes and skipped some readings in non-philosophy courses, but all the work I did was my own. It was through doing the actual work of reading philosophical pieces and writing critically about them that I fell in love with philosophy. Philosophy is, after all, mostly about wrestling with ideas rather than being handed conclusions.
I am not particularly offended that the students aren’t dedicated, heart and soul, to philosophy. I do maintain, as do many philosophers, that philosophical inquiry is more often than not an end in and of itself. But I understand that not everyone will want to spend all their time doing philosophy as I do. I would be extremely surprised, however, if any of the students using AI to cheat in philosophy courses are limiting their misconduct to just the one subject. More likely, these students are using AI in a wide variety of subjects (though perhaps mostly limited to the humanities and social sciences).
What breaks my heart is that these students might totally miss an intellectual opportunity or field of inquiry that really speaks to them. Every students needn’t be interested in every subject (I, for example, abhorred studying chemistry). It does, however seem to be good for students to maintain a broad array of intellectual interests. Too narrow a focus on any one field risks students lacking (1) appreciation (or worse, respect) for disciplines of which they are not a part, and (2) the mental richness that comes from an acquaintance with multiple fields of study. If students decide that it’s not worth their time to put in the effort on any of the subjects that won’t appear in a future job title, they risk narrowing their focus in this way.
The Young Student by Ozias Leduc, 1894
Academic outcry at new technologies is, of course, nothing new. I remember when I was in high school teachers were increasingly concerned with the use of Wikipedia as a knowledge source. Or, for a more striking case, consider Socrates’ opinion on writing (given as a speech from a king to the inventor of writing):
In fact, it will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own. You have not discovered a potion for remembering, but for reminding; you provide your students with the appearance of wisdom, not with its reality. (Phaedrus 275a)
It is, I suppose, possible that students are just on the next wave of human intellectual activity, and that AI will enable the proliferation of knowledge in the same way that writing has. Socrates was wrong about writing, and his claims about writing are roughly analogous to my claims about AI. If Socrates is wrong, why couldn’t I be?
There are certainly parallels between my criticisms of kids these days and Socrates’ criticism of kids those days, but closer attention is merited here. Socrates is concerned that writing will allow people to feel as though they have knowledge without actually having it. The idea here, I think, is that someone whose home is full of unread books might claim to have all the knowledge of the books by virtue of their presence in her house, she nonetheless lacks real knowledge since the wisdom of the books is not in her brain.
If the critique is framed like this, it doesn’t seem that Socrates is actually that far off the mark. We know that books are not valuable for knowledge creation unless they are actually read. Where Socrates seems to go wrong is in discounting writing entirely because of the possibility that people would invoke the written word of other thinkers without fully understanding it. As we now know, writing can be used as a tool for generating real understanding, both by reading books and by writing ones own thoughts on those books.
My critique of students’ use of AI is, to be clear, analogous to the more narrow understanding of Socrates’ critique of writing. I do think there are ways to use AI that can actually enhance the learning experience. I myself have used it to generate reading comprehension questions before working through an assignment (this works best with historic figures, and one must always be cautious of the Buchanan issue above). If you aren’t acquainted with an area of inquiry, it can offer you some introductory resources and background resources (though one should also consult multiple sources when learning a new subject). There are excellent ways to use AI to accelerate learning (though, as the caveats suggest, they have limits).
If these students were using AI as a supplement to their learning, they probably would have caught that Gemini (or ChatGPT, or Claude) was feeding them incorrect responses. The students I caught this week certainly didn’t catch this, and so likely didn’t even complete the readings. It is this sort of intellectual laziness and naivety that is most concerning. To augment the learning process is one thing, but to attempt to substitute it with the imitation of critical thought is, well, unthinkable.
The question remains what to do about it. Instilling independent motivation to learn in students is perhaps the most difficult task of education, and not something for which I have any certain answers. Just telling students that philosophy is valuable won’t cut it, and there are few carrots to offer beyond a decent grade upon demonstration of meaningful and critical understanding of the course material. The core problem is, of course, a lack of appreciation for delayed gratification. Maybe I shouldn’t make myself (wholly) responsible for my students’ learning this.
I’ve started to babble, so I’ll end with the king’s verdict on the invention of writing:
Your invention will enable them to hear many things without being properly taught, and they will imagine that they have come to know much while for the most part they will know nothing. And they will be difficult to get along with, since they will merely appear to be wise instead of really being so. (Phaedrus 275a-b)
Please let me know your thoughts! Thanks for reading!