The death of thought by AI prompt

The theoretical models behind AI have existed for decades in various forms—cybersecurity systems, target recognition, recommendation engines, customer service chatbots, and even Clippy, the friendly anthropomorphic paperclip in MS Word. But AI entered mainstream vocabulary only in recent years. 

With the rise of generative large language models (LLMs), what was once an elite technology is now widely accessible. And the response has been overwhelming.  Social media is awash with Ghibli-fied images; users seek companionship from chatbots, generate itineraries and recipes, or look up information on nearly any subject. AI—as it is commonly and mistakenly called—has become an indispensable part of daily life for many.  

In the context of university education, the primary concern is LLMs—supercomputers trained on vast quantities of human-generated text: novels, poems, textbooks, social media posts, and more. These machines, backed by large processors, learn to predict how a human might respond to a given prompt using the most common textual data available. The result often reflects the lowest common denominator of human thought, with a tendency towards unverified claims and fake sources. Among the small group of critics, LLMs have earned a reputation as tools of plagiarism and hallucination.  

LLMs have found their ideal consumer in the wide-eyed undergraduate facing a deadline, while educators struggle to respond to this large-scale hijacking of the process meant to foster problem-solving, original thinking, critical interrogation, and precise articulation. While all of academia stands threatened, the English Literature classroom finds itself confronting particularly dire predictions. 

The very concept of invention has been almost entirely claimed by science and technology. Today, the word tends to evoke something tangible and mechanical—from the primitive wheel to the latest bullet train. Most people don’t think of abstractions as inventions, and even fewer would associate invention with literature. But the novel is an invention – and so is the poem, the play, and the epic: each a new way of perceiving and representing the world.

After World War I, Virginia Woolf famously asserted that life was not ‘a series of gig lamps symmetrically aligned’; she inaugurated a new representational model for a world radically altered – where the certainties of Enlightenment—the rationality of man, the linearity of time, and a cohesive consciousness—lay shattered.  

The creative spark, or ‘divine madness’, is often seen as the prerogative of genius, appearing only once in a generation. However, the inventiveness of thought and the creativity afforded by perspective are not inherent skills one possesses; they are habits to be inculcated through observing, reflecting, and synthesising.

What the LLMs offer, then, is a Faustian bargain where they do the seemingly boring work for you, effectively leading to the atrophying of one’s intellectual muscles. When an English Literature student implores ChatGPT to write an academic essay comparing two texts, the bot furnishes the student with one which looks like an essay in structure and quacks like an essay in tone—but isn’t credible because the machine has invented illogical connections, introduced irrelevant material, and made the most superficial of arguments. More damningly, this bypasses the process of thinking-through-writing, involving outlining, draughting, revising, and editing, which brings the student closer to understanding logic, argumentation, and theorising. 

The humanities classroom—particularly the English one—has always been a space of becoming. Becoming more curious, more introspective, more interesting and more intelligent. Intelligence, however, is not merely cognitive reduplication. It is also the human ability to feel joy and despair, adapt to unimaginable adversity, and be transformed by experience. As we move into a world where the LLMs promise to painlessly deliver outputs for us, it is precisely this sacred process of ‘becoming’ that is threatened. It is this process that we need to safeguard for our students.  

What the English classroom will offer young people in the age of LLMs is a space that prioritises practice and process. Our aim is not to churn out novelists. The ultimate deliverable of this space is a person who is alive to the possibilities of this changing world, able to give the gift of sustained attention to it—a quality that is vanishingly rare in the time of the infinite scroll. A person with the critical skills necessary to see linkages of cause and effect, grasp systemic influences at the macro level and understand their impact on the micro unit. These skills, already important, are poised to become even more desirable in the post-LLM world.  

It has been said that love is exception-making, and that will be true in this context also.  The exceptions in a world of people whose intellectual and emotional faculties have been stunted by overreliance on LLMs will be those who love the work that goes into being human. 

(The writers are faculty at Azim Premji University, Bhopal)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the authors' own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.