If you pay someone to decorate your house for the holidays, your house is going to look great. Professional holiday decorating companies have ladders, boom lifts and a staff impervious to heights. With lasers, light shows and LEDs, they can work as many wonders as you can afford.
Your house will look great on social media and your holiday cards. But it will also look a lot like the other professionally decorated houses in our neighborhood. It will be just another cookie-cutter, knock-off, copy of a Hallmark Christmas movie. It might look “too good”, but it will also look fake. No one is going to think that you did that yourself.
Decorating your house yourself is a completely different experience.
It starts with you and your family digging around the attic or basement to find where you left everything from last year. And when you finally find them, those old lights, reindeer and sled are going to spark a lot of conversations when you drag them out. There’s memories in those old decorations.
Once you get them outside you’re likely to have passionate debates about how you’re going to upgrade and improve this year’s decorations or whether you’re going to experiment with a new redesign. You’ll have to untangles everything and see what works, maybe go out to buy something new. Then you might risk your life tree climbing or getting up on the roof.
In the end though, try as you might, you’ll never make it perfect. It will be uneven, and some of the lights won’t work. But it will be original and it will be yours, and you and your family will have all the growth and memories from doing it yourselves.
So you can have something that looks great, but has none of your soul in it. The pictures will look nice, but a little fake – and you’ll have gained nothing from the process. Or you could have something that’s less than perfect, but that’s all yours and you and your family will have added another’s year’s memories to pass on.
Using generative AI to write is a lot like hiring a professional holiday decorating service. Sure, it the text sound good in a way, but it will also sound a little fake – a cookie cutter copy of other AI generated text. And you’ll gain nothing from using it.
I doubt I can make teachers and students see AI in this way – but that doesn’t mean I’m not going to try.