Giorgio Iemmolo, is learning possible without writing?
AI chatbots are taking over writing for students and researchers. Linguist Giorgio Iemmolo explains what we are jeopardising in the interest of efficiency gains.
"If we leave writing to AI chatbots, we won't just lose a craft and the skills. Because writing is more than that. Writing is thinking, involving cognitive processes. The one is not downstream from the other, they are co-emergent: Linguists have shown that thoughts and their expression arise synchronously. Authors who are struggling for words refine their style – and they form and reorganise their knowledge in the process. I am familiar with this from my own experience: If I can't put complex ideas into simple words, I haven't understood them properly yet.
AI can be useful for triggering ideas or gaining new perspectives: but the genuine thinking only sets in when we write ourselves. This realisation is anything but new. Writing has long been a path to realisation: Greek rhetoric, medieval scholasticism and the scientific revolution used writing to develop ideas. The structured argumentation was not a decoration, but the manner in which the truth was approached.
The expert
external page Giorgio Iemmolo is a linguist and Director of the Language Centre at ETH and the University of Zurich. He likes to have texts translated from language models into other languages and back again in order to observe how meanings and nuances change
Neuroscience also confirms that writing is thinking: Neuronal connections are formed during writing, which are decisive for abstraction and long-term memory. Especially writing by hand activates regions of the brain that enable deep learning and conceptual thinking. Consequently, writing helps the brain to recognise major and far-reaching connections and to develop specialist knowledge that not only lives from facts, but is also based on understanding and can be applied in many different contexts.
Research into automation knows that cognitive systems atrophy when tasks calling for thinking are outsourced to machines. And there is a second stumbling block: The products of generative AI skilfully imitate knowledge, thereby disguising our dwindling skills. We sound eloquent without genuinely comprehending and without realising that we don't understand.
If students no longer write themselves, the diversity of perspectives and arguments will also suffer. This should give us pause for thought, because science thrives on the constant flow of new voices, questions and insights. These only arise, however, when people engage with knowledge in depth and in a critical manner.
Multilingualism is also a means to this end. People who read and think in several languages approach a topic from different perspectives – because languages organise knowledge differently. German, for example, abstracts in complicated sentences. French uses opposites. English makes a linear argument and takes readers by the hand.
This is not just a matter of style, it's about different ways of thinking. People who speak several languages think more flexibly. Generative AI does exactly the opposite. The results tend towards the mean and reflect English norms. Intellectual diversity gives way to linguistic plainness and simplicity.
Consequently, universities and schools should promote multilingualism, thereby promoting the ability to think abstractly and in terms of interactions and networks. AI-free writing must also be given a fixed place. This could be exams with pen and paper or writing tasks in class. Short interventions are also possible, in which students record their findings about the learning process – in writing or in the form of mutual feedback, the peer review. It is important here that lecturers are trained to evaluate the cognitive processes associated with writing rather than the final results.
Above all, however, I would advise universities to resist the urge for efficiency that AI tools promise. Because in-depth reflection and thinking takes time, and we should take that time despite all the promises of efficiency emanating from AI."
From Zukunftsblog to Perspectives
The Zukunftsblog has been redesigned and is now called Perspectives. The ETH Zurich author platform showcases ETH experts who address socially relevant questions and provide context for current topics.
The editorial team welcomes ideas for topics as well as feedback at
Click here to read the latest Perspectives articles