Artificial intelligence is not the end of high-school English

If you've been on social media lately, you've doubtless encountered fictional stories and essays generated by "ChatGPT," an artificial intelligence program that can generate remarkably solid pieces of prose in response to prompts both serious and whimsical, and can do so instantly and in any imaginable style. Others, mostly writers and teachers, are filled with existential dread. "My life--and the lives of thousands of other teachers and professors, tutors and administrators--is about to drastically change," wrote English teacher Daniel Herman in The Atlantic. My hunch is that's a lot less true than he thinks. For starters, let's immediately dispense with the idea that artificial intelligence will make writing instruction obsolete.