I Wish AI Wouldn’t Try to Tell Me What I Want to Say!

I made the mistake of putting Grammarly on my computer. It was free until I graduated in May, but it was still available to me. Admittedly, it improved my grammar for my schoolwork, and when you are writing 20-30-page papers, it is a good thing to have. But when I write my blog posts, I keep having to “dismiss” the changes it keeps suggesting. For example, I would write, “I had a wonderful time in Vienna.” The AI component in Grammarly wants me to choose “excellent” or “remarkable.” AI acts as though it knows my innermost feelings and emotions better than I do.

Also, sometimes in my blogs, it seems AI is chastising me for my word choices or sentences. I want to ask it, “Were you there to tell me what to report or not report to my readers and friends?” It can be maddening! So, I have chosen not to renew it. I am receiving countless emails saying I need Grammarly and that it would be bad not to renew it.

Just before I retired from college teaching for the last time, AI burst onto the scene, and in the college-mandated AI Statement, I informed students that they were not to use AI to write their papers. I told students that the product I was selling was critical thinking, which includes learning how to find relevant information and ask the right questions of themselves based on the texts they read. AI undermines critical thinking by doing students’ work for them. Also, AI doesn’t allow students to cite their own work because, while mining other people’s work, it doesn’t credit the original authors, which is plagiarism.

So, if my blog posts have bad grammar and punctuation, at least appreciate that it is all my thinking and word choices. Know that no machine is telling me what to share with you. I have come to have a feel for what people will read, and AI doesn’t have a clue! I know people like it, and students will continue to ask Copilot and ChatGPT for help writing papers, but I like the old-fashioned way of learning grammar and sentence structure, to write papers and blog posts.

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