For years, a specific brand of desperate plea has echoed through the hallways of academia and the quiet corners of the digital world. It is a request made by teachers, professors, and professional writers alike, directed at a generation of students increasingly tempted by the convenience of automation: Please, for the sake of your education and your voice, do not use artificial intelligence to write for you. This sentiment, once a whisper of concern among early adopters of technology, has transformed into a deafening roar as generative AI tools like ChatGPT have become ubiquitous in the lives of modern learners.
Anne Lovering Rounds, a professor of English at Hostos Community College within the City University of New York (CUNY) system, is among those on the front lines of this technological shift. Like many of her colleagues across the country, she has felt compelled to codify this plea into the formal structure of her courses. Her syllabus now contains the dutifully included boilerplate language suggested by her institution, a legalistic disclaimer that has become standard in the post-2022 academic landscape: “The use of generative AI tools such as but not limited to ChatGPT is prohibited on all assignments and assessments in this course.”
However, behind the official prohibitions lies a deeper, more systemic frustration. Professor Rounds, along with a growing number of educators, is experiencing a profound weariness. It is the exhaustion of reading student submissions that claim to “delve” into assigned texts with a suspicious, robotic enthusiasm, or that consistently argue a thesis using the predictable, binary framing of “it isn’t X—it’s Y.” These linguistic fingerprints have become the tell-tale signs of a machine trying to mimic the nuance of human thought, often failing to capture anything beyond a surface-level imitation of academic rigor.
Yet, as Professor Rounds suggests, the common arguments against using AI in the English classroom—often rooted in appeals to "academic integrity" or the "soul of writing"—can often feel, in a word, cringe. The reality is that AI is not just a tool for cheating; it is a catalyst forcing a long-overdue pedagogical crisis. This crisis is not merely about how to detect plagiarism, but about a fundamental confusion regarding what English courses are meant to accomplish and how they are described to the public. As the development of AI shows no signs of slowing down, the academic community is being presented with a rare opportunity to dismantle the professional and public conflation of three distinct pillars: literary appreciation, knowledge of literary history, and the craft of essay writing.
In the traditional university model, these three areas of study are often treated as a single, monolithic entity. This blurring of lines is perhaps most evident in the very title of the course Professor Rounds teaches—a requirement for nearly every student at her college: Literature and Composition. This title, while traditional, masks a significant cognitive burden placed upon the student. The more time one spends in the classroom, the more apparent the “fuzziness” of that conjunction—the “and”—becomes.
