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All journalists know the agony of staring at a blank page, that torturous moment before we begin setting our story down, as we wrestle with how to start. The stakes are high. We must not only ensure the piece we write is correct and fair, but we must tell the story clearly, and in a way that engages you, our readers. It’s harder than it sounds.
Some blank pages are filled more easily than others. Sometimes stories are so interesting, they almost write themselves. Others, particularly those involving complex policy, need more thought. Crafting a feature can be hardest of all, knowing our challenge is to hold your attention for 2000 words or more.
For me, the most difficult stories to write are the ones I’ve loved researching; I’m daunted by the challenge of diluting so much fascinating stuff into a few hundred or thousand words, while doing the subject justice.
It might be unpleasant, but I now know that blank page torture is good for me. The agony forces you to delve deeply into the subject matter, decide on its most important elements, and work out how to convey it to the reader in a way that’s clear, engaging and comprehensive. It helps you deepen your understanding and crystallise your analysis, all the better to lay those thoughts on a page. It makes you a better writer and thinker, blank page by agonising blank page.
It’s not only journalists who know this agony. We all feel it when we’re preparing to write on a special birthday card, or put together a wedding speech, or email our thanks to a beloved teacher.
Herald journalists confront blank pages every day. But in the wider community, artificial intelligence is allowing us to bypass those agonising moments. AI assistance might be fine for an email to the accountant, but its use by school and university students has many people – parents, teachers and policy-makers – worried, not only because an AI-written essay doesn’t allow educators to see what a student can actually do, but also because kids are outsourcing their thinking.
On Monday, the Herald broke the story of Education Minister Prue Car’s decision to ask the NSW Education Standards Authority, which runs the Higher School Certificate, to suspend from next year take-home assessments that count towards a student’s HSC marks. NSW has long prided itself on its HSC being the gold standard, and this move will protect it against concerns that marks are being skewed by cheating while NESA runs a wider review.
The move was about cheating, but also about thinking. Car pointed out the importance of stopping students from outsourcing their cognitive processes. “If you want to run a marathon, you don’t practice on a computer,” she says. “You don’t build grey matter by getting a computer to do the thinking for you.”
Her request follows another Herald exclusive a few months ago, warning that students override the learning process when they delegate their thinking to AI. As one teacher said, “Kids are trying to get the answer the shortest, fastest, quickest, most convenient way possible, and are missing the point that yes, getting the right answer matters – but it matters because of the process you’ve gone through to get there.”
There’s also deep concern about AI’s impact on jobs. This week, we published a story by Sally Rawsthorne on its impact on the graduate market, another on the impact of AI on Canva’s valuation, and economics writer Millie Muroi looked at how KMart is using an AI bot to assist in its hiring process. (Marc McGowan’s piece on how AI is professionalising junior sport is also worth a read). Keep an eye out for another piece from Sally on Sunday about AI-proof jobs.
But AI’s impact on literacy is also an increasingly urgent global discussion. The cover story in this month’s The Atlantic magazine questions whether society is reaching a post-literate age, after a brief golden era of literacy. It’s easy to forget that reading and writing have been democratised for just a short period of human history; even after the printing press, literacy was a luxury for the elite until a concerted effort to teach the children of the poor in the late 18th century.
“It’s mentally enfeebling – an escalator toward a result when you really need to make a daily habit of taking the stairs.”
New York Times columnist Bret Stephens
The Atlantic recalls the work of Walter J Ong, who argued that the cognitive process involved in writing had transformed human consciousness, and created the conditions for inner concentration, extended focus, and logical dedication. It also pointed out that in recent history, from 2006 to 2018, American adults’ ability to answer logic questions, to reason effectively and to analyse patterns had declined. Today’s adults also have a smaller vocabulary than Americans with an equivalent education 50 years ago.
Meanwhile, New York Times columnist Bret Stephens last week beseeched readers not to write with AI, warning that “it’s mentally enfeebling – an escalator toward a result when you really need to make a daily habit of taking the stairs”. He wrote that as AI becomes ubiquitous, “it undermines not only our individual ability to write but also a society’s collective ability to reason, a culture’s inner capacity to create, and everyone’s reason to care”.
This is a powerful argument. It doesn’t suggest we shouldn’t use AI to make our lives easier and the low-level tasks at work more efficient, but rather that we should avoid the temptation to rely on it for the most important cognitive processes – not only for the sake of our own personal knowledge, but for the health of our grey matter, and for the sake of us all; a democracy is stronger if voters have the reasoning skills developed through reading and writing.
I realise that Herald subscribers who have reached this point in my note are already highly literate and engaged, and that I’m probably preaching to the converted. But remember, as you pore over our news, features, photographs and quizzes this weekend, you’re not only reading for your personal pleasure, you’re contributing to your knowledge, to Australia’s democracy, and to the health of your brain.
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