Letter to the editor
Dear editor, It’s not often that we receive written letters these days so I was surprised to receive one enthusiastically written by my little brother, a soon-to-be fourth grader at Crestline Elementary who may have thought his big brother would make a good pen-pal.
With a few sentences and a drawing of us in New York City, he spoke words onto paper like a boy his age would, and as I read, I heard his voice as if he were talking to me in the same room. Whether it is a text message, an email, a letter, or even the telegraphs of old, when we see words our loved ones write, we hear their voice because we know they wrote it. This thought reminded me of a disturbing trend I heard that is happening at schools everywhere, including at my alma mater in Hartselle and for all I know even at Crestline alongside my brother.
Writing generators, powered by ChatGPT and other language models freely available online and easy-to-use, allow students to rely on machines to write school essays, emails and any other ‘tedious’ writing tasks within seconds. At Hartselle High School, generations of students have written thousands of essays as part of the English curriculum. Aside from being a grade in the books, years of language arts work in Hartselle schools develop vocabularies and, most especially, personal writing styles. Everyone has a personal writing style, and when you read something from your loved one you will recognize that style as theirs and hear that spoken voice. When you read a text message, you feel the emotions from the words. When you read the love letters your grandmother saved, you feel the passion your grandfather had. And when you read the Gospel, you feel the majesty of God who made the Word flesh. This is the power of the written word, which we take for granted and is now under threat. Students and adults alike, seeking to save time and shirk work, are giving up their written voice for that written by an algorithm that copies the combined written voices of the Internet so that the message you read may sound personal or professional but does not come from the mind nor the heart. This technology, now even provided by Google on searches, is brand new for us regular folks.
There is still time to teach ourselves and children to not rely on machines to write for us and dull our own writing style. Imagine your own disappointment to learn that a message you received from your child was the product of the child asking a machine “write a letter in the voice of a 9-year-old.” As teachers at Hartselle grapple with “AI Detectors” to catch would-be cheaters turning in essays written by machines, we must protect our own voices and not become over-reliant on asking machines to write everything for us. We must cherish our God-given speech, both verbal and written. I wrote a letter in response to the one I received, which I am told my little brother excitedly checked the mailbox to find. He can read that letter and know that my voice is with him, and when I get any future messages from him, no matter the format, I always want to have his words and his voice.
Jonah Estrada Parsippany, New Jersey Formerly of Hartselle
