What good is writing anyway?
Illustrations by Liz Zonarich/Harvard Staff Arts & Culture What good is writing anyway? Scholars across range of disciplines weigh in on value of the activity amid rise of generative AI systems Liz Mineo Harvard Staff Writer June 2, 2025 9 min read What do students stand to lose if they no longer have to write? Since the arrival of ChatGPT in 2022, many students have turned to AI for help writing papers, and use is expected to grow as students become more adept with it. The shift raised immediate concerns among educators about academic integrity and broader ones about what it could mean to intellectual and cognitive development. The Gazette spoke with faculty across a range of disciplines, including a computer scientist, a philosopher, a neurologist, and two cognitive scientists, among others, to ask them about what may lie ahead. We asked the same question to GPT-4, which describes itself as “OpenAI’s most advanced system that produces safer and more...