Teach Editing, Not Writing

Updated: 2025.10.04 18D ago 5 sources
If AI soon writes at or above the 95th percentile, students should be trained to direct, critique, and revise AI drafts rather than to compose from scratch. Instruction would cover topic selection, style guidance, prompt/constraint design, and structured revision workflows. Writing classes become editorial studios where human judgment shapes model output. — This flips plagiarism and pedagogy debates by making AI‑assisted authorship the default and forces schools, employers, and publishers to redefine merit and assessment.

Sources

Some AI Links
Arnold Kling 2025.10.04 85% relevant
Alexandr Wang tells teens to spend '10,000 hours' vibe‑coding and Jensen Huang says natural language is the new programming language; Kling argues CS knowledge will add less value as AI does more coding—directly echoing the shift from composing to directing AI.
Tech Companies To K-12 Schoolchildren: Learn To AI Is the New Learn To Code
msmash 2025.10.03 45% relevant
The article’s push for mainstream AI literacy in K–12 aligns with the broader shift this idea anticipates—moving instruction from traditional composition toward directing and evaluating AI outputs, which schools will need to operationalize if 'Hour of AI' scales.
Will Computer Science become useless knowledge?
Arnold Kling 2025.10.01 75% relevant
Kling’s claim that future software engineers may not need deep CS (e.g., logic gates) and should focus on tools/integration echoes the shift from hand‑authoring to directing and revising AI outputs.
OpenAI's First Study On ChatGPT Usage
BeauHD 2025.09.16 82% relevant
The paper finds 28% of all chats involve writing help, and that editing/critique is more common than generating from scratch—especially in work use (42% overall; 52% in business/management). This directly supports shifting instruction toward directing and revising AI output.
Teaching Writing in the age of AI
Arnold Kling 2025.09.03 100% relevant
Arnold Kling’s analogy to Othello engines and his claim that 'the future of writing will look more like editing' as AI quality surpasses elite human prose.
← Back to All Ideas