Content Providers

I’ve mostly avoided the dismal topic of Large Language Models and what they will do to the future of writing, both in college and outside it. But like the narrator of H. P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness, “I am forced into speech because men of science have refused to follow my advice without knowing why.” The men of science are in charge of pedagogical rules and resources at MIT, and my advice is to restrict the use of LLMs by undergraduates—a path that calls for ingenuity and material support.

I don’t want to dwell on academic infighting. Instead, I want to write about why writing matters, inspired by the social historian Joe Moran’s ardent letter to his students, “You are not an angel.”

The fantasy of angelic communication—mind to mind, without the messy intervention of the body—is not new. It goes back to St. Augustine and returned at the birth of the internet. Moran cites Mark Dery, in Escape Velocity, on the “activist-entrepreneur Stewart Brand [who] argued that ‘when you…