Colleagues in composition focus on plagiarism, policing, and employment concerns, yet text-generation technology poses broader risks to democratic institutions, voter judgment, and workforce competence. Proponents claim LLMs will democratize good writing, but many AI-produced assignments lack quality. Research indicates reliance on ChatGPT reduces idea diversity, with a Nature Human Behaviour study finding substantial overlap among AI-assisted ideas. North American models that assume western norms risk producing inaccurate or discriminatory information about other cultures. A healthy democracy requires diverse perspectives, experience, talent, and know-how; civic diversity cannot be replicated by machines and may be damaged by widespread outsourcing of thinking to chatbots.
I think my colleagues, focused on concerns about plagiarism, policing and the tenability of our own employment (all pressing issues in their own rights), may be ignoring the greater threat that text-generation technology poses to our democratic institutions, the judgment of our electorate and the competence of our workforce.
In a study published by Nature Human Behaviour, researchers discovered that "reliance on ChatGPT ... reduces the diversity of ideas in a pool of ideas," to the degree that " 94 percent of ideas from those who used ChatGPT 'shared overlapping concepts.'"
A diversity of perspective, experience, talent and know-how are required to run and maintain a healthy democratic society. That civic diversity cannot be replicated by machines, and it would be severely damaged by voter rolls consisting of former students educated in the art of outsourcing their mental faculties to chat bots.
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