A Quick Note from Matt: Good Grammar: Joyful and Affirming Language Lessons That Work for More Students is officially out! More will be coming on it next week, but right now you can get 25% off and free shipping if you order from Corwin and use the coded RAVEN25

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If you have been watching the Olympics, you likely already know the now-pulled-from-the-air commercial I’m referencing in the title. It ran incessantly last week, and in it a father thanks Google’s new Gemini AI for doing most of the writing for his daughter’s fan mail to the American runner Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone. Here it is for those who haven’t seen it:

This commercial has been widely and rightly questioned. TechCrunch asks, who wants an AI-created piece of fan mail? And Liz Prather so thoughtfully argues that one danger of this kind of thinking is that “it is not the writing we are outsourcing to the machines—it’s our hearts, our beating, yearning, thinking hearts.”

As I watched the commercial the first (and second and tenth) time, I shared similar thoughts to Prather and TechCrunch, but I also had a third thought that may at first seem admittedly odd: It’s about time. 

I should clarify that I didn’t think that it was about time for Google to tell the whole country that it was fine to have a computer write plagiaristic fan mail for a young girl. Nor did I agree with the insinuation that doing away with that pesky business of crafting and drafting—of figuring out and refining our thoughts through the act of writing—is a clear win for society. 

No, instead I was glad that someone finally said the quiet part out loud. 

Because over the last year I’ve been watching my students quietly get these kinds of messages over and over and over again from the various AI companies without many people seeming to notice or care. My hope is that broadcasting those same messages so loudly on one of the largest stages will finally get people seriously thinking and talking about how the arguments and tools from the big tech companies might affect our young people. 

To get a better sense of the messages so many of our students are getting, let’s take Grammarly. I reference Grammarly, not because they are approaching it differently than Google or OpenAI, but because they are the clear favorite “writing partner” program for my students. As last year progressed, I watched Grammarly metamorphose from a grammar/spell check program that focused mostly on convention issues to a program that asks you at every turn for it to rewrite what you have written. 

For a specific example of how it tries to take over one’s writing, I downloaded the student version for this post—which was billed to me as “Better Writing, Better Results: Be perfectly professional, clear, and convincing in a few clicks, not a few hours”—and put in three paragraphs of a professionally-published article that I wrote a few weeks back. Instantly it gave it a rating (an 89/100! Not even cracking the A range. Ouch.), and identified eight potential issues with correctness, clarity, and engagement that I could only see if I signed up for the paid service (which also offers to rewrite sentences, change vocabulary, brainstorm, and yes, write something for you). It also gave me a menu bar where it offered to rewrite it in a way that was…

• More persuasive
• More assertive
• More confident
• More constructive
• More casual
• More formal 

I selected a few of these, and I was struck at how it instantly and dramatically changed my voice. I also have to say (and I am admittedly a bit biased) that each of them made it worse in my opinion, as they traded my voice for a flat facsimile of casualness or assertiveness.

In the end, I do not share all this with you to pick on Grammarly. They are doing the same sort of messaging and offering similar services as a dozen other Gen AI goliaths. Further, I think the New AI tools are remarkable in many ways and have plenty of very positive potential applications. 

Instead, I simply want to show that the messages in Google’s Gemini commercial are not confined to a poorly-framed Google commercial; similar messages have been and are still being quietly fed to students on a regular basis. 

Up until now, I think the norm in most classrooms has been to avoid too much discussion of AI beyond maybe a warning or two to students not to use it to plagiarize. This makes a lot of sense because these tools are so new and we want to get it right, but I view the “Dear Sydney” commercial as a call to us: It is time to talk deeply and thoughtfully with our students about AI tools and their potential uses and misuses. 

At this point, AI isn’t a secret, and if we don’t talk and teach about it, then the only messages many students will receive will be those from the AI companies—messages that often argue directly or indirectly that machine writing is better than human writing and that the writing process (including brainstorming, prewriting, drafting, and editing) is inefficient and a waste of time. I believe that these messages are really problematic, so to challenge them, I am going to find ways to examine and discuss AI (and maybe even use it in responsible ways) in my classes this year. My starting point will be the lesson below, which we will do the first week of the new year. 

1. I will start by sharing the “Dear Sydney” commercial (and maybe Apple’s “Crush!” ad, which was panned for a related reason) and my own experience on Grammarly (seriously — eight “errors” in three paragraphs and only an 89?).
2. Next, I’ll share some of the critiques of this commercial with them, and then we will discuss their thoughts on it, first in groups and then as a class. I’m sure at some point I will express my feelings that good human writing is still far superior to Gen AI writing because it has a voice and perspective and that the writing process is essential because it is where one finds and refines thinking, but I also want to make sure to leave lots of room to hear their thinking as well. 
3. We will discuss how we should approach AI both in our class and school more widely. What uses seem legitimate or even a potential way to speed learning? What uses are problematic or could slow their growth? And, if any AI is allowed, what can we do to make clear what work comes from the student and what work comes from the AI? 
4. Out of these discussions in my five classes I hope to build a policy that meets the current moment while also planting the seed for future discussions about how to move forward in this braver-by-the-moment new world we are all living in.

There will be more soon on my other thoughts about how I will approach AI this year, but for now I want to wrap it up by saying that I hope everyone had a great summer, and I’m looking forward to the 8th (!) year of the newsletter in 2024-2025.

Thanks for reading, and yours in teaching,

Matt