We can be sure that “statistics show,” or will soon be made to show, that speakers who use ChatGPT are thought to be better speakers. Soon we will hear the inevitable praise from the professors who gave us a laptop on every desk: the use of AI represents a great democratic advance. It’s a leveler, after all, like cellphones: it brings not only equal opportunity but equal outcomes. But like every promise of effortless success, this one is empty. There will still be competition, only for the best AI programs generating speeches, which means competition in money to purchase the latest fabrications.

What my colleague was recommending, with the best of intentions, would result in the absence of the cultivation of the requisite skill, and hence the absence of that skill altogether. Telling our students to let AI do their work, or a substantial part of their work, will mean that they will never learn grammar, how to turn a phrase, how to write a compelling, arresting formulation, how to win over an audience through persuading or convincing. The consumers of AI will never know what it means to persuade, to invent, or to discover. They will fail to observe the human hopes and fears and other passions that move and motivate us. They may not even grasp the import of what the AI speech is saying. They will certainly be more liable to carry whatever unthought-through implications the AI generator unwittingly harbors.