Laura Hartenberger: What's Wrong with Chatbot Writing?
A UCLA writing instructor talks about flat prose, uncanny voices — and giving away your power as a writer
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OpenAI publicly released ChatGPT at the end of 2022, but that doesn’t mean the debate is over about whether to use AI for writing. In particular, teachers in public schools and at the university level have had to confront big questions. Are bots helpful tools for students or just another way of cheating? How and when should such tools be part of writing assignments? What qualities of voice and meaningful exposition are missing from chatbot writing? Can AI-generated work emotionally move readers?
Last May, TW founder Martha Nichols explored those questions and more with Laura Hartenberger, author of the definitive 2023 essay “What AI Teaches Us About Good Writing” in Noema. Laura, who’s a lecturer in the Writing Programs at University of California at Los Angeles, is an essayist and fiction writer herself. When she spoke with Martha, they were both finishing up a turbulent spring semester that included protests for and against Israel at UCLA and Harvard.
Campus politics may have moved on since spring 2024 and last fall’s U.S. presidential election, but the ethical questions posed by artificial intelligence are more relevant than ever in the early months of 2025. For instance: how do we stem the flood of disinformation if generative AI tools can fabricate and spread falsehoods in seconds? If information from authority figures sounds plausible simply because of writing conventions replicated by a bot, how do we know what’s true?
Martha and Laura address the ethics of using AI for expository writing, part of the core curriculum in many educational programs. They dig into the sense of agency that comes from learning how to write. As Laura says toward the end of their conversation:
“If you give your power to an AI, you’re losing something meaningful.”
There’s no doubt that students need to become familiar with chatbots and generative AI, if only because they’re everywhere now. An increasing number of educators are incorporating AI in lessons or working with AI to create lesson plans and curriculum. Laura and Martha talk about what AI use might look like in class and how their own approaches to teaching writing are changing.
Yet even with growing public acceptance of bots like ChatGPT — or the gut-sinking unease many writing instructors feel about bowing to the reality of AI use — machine-generated prose still doesn’t measure up to well-crafted human writing. A number of commentators and teachers have pointed to the problematic bot qualities Laura identified in her 2023 essay, such as flat or generic wording and a lack of meaning.
The question is whether human qualities of voice matter in a world that prizes efficiency and quantitative results. If the expository writing produced sounds good enough, why not trade off some creativity or emotional connection? Individual writers, teachers, and readers will all have different responses to that question.
These two writing instructors acknowledge adjusting to the AI transformation underway at the same time that they ring warning bells. Laura reads several excerpts from her Noema essay. Here’s another quote from her piece that gets at one of the mysteries of good human writing: the intimacy and connection it forges with a reader:
“Reading ChatGPT’s writing feels uncanny because there’s no driver at the wheel, no real connection being built. While the machine can articulate stakes, it is indifferent to them; it doesn’t care if we care, and somehow that diminishes its power. Its writing tends not to move us emotionally; at best, it evokes a sense of muted awe akin to watching a trained dog shake a hand: Hey, look what it can do.
“Narrative writing tends to become more relatable and engaging as it gains specificity — but ChatGPT is a collective voice, not a specific one, and so even as the algorithm improves, we will likely continue to find its writing emotionally inadequate. Perhaps the ineffable spark of good writing and the spark of a romantic connection are related — both involve a certain energy exchange, a sense of connection across individual minds, a balance of surprise and familiarity.”
What do you think? TW and Martha Nichols welcome comments about AI and writing, especially about your own experience with it as an educator.
For more about Laura Hartenberger, visit her website.
For more about Noema, see the Berggruen Institute website.
Also see “Sean Michaels on AI, Poetry, and the Future of Creativity,” another 2024 TW interview with Martha Nichols. Laura and Martha discuss Sean’s novel Do You Remember Being Born? during their conversation.
