Fuck AI

10 pages hand written in cursive in 1982.

I once had a professor who claimed she passed a high level language course without attending a class or studying it. She was fluent in an adjacent Romance language and knew a little of some other overlapping languages. Basically walked in to the final and got a C+ on cognates alone.

I wrote 10 pages single spaced by accident after failing to read an instruction that asked for double spacing. Writing that much about intercellular communication 25 years ago took flipping weeks at the library

I did a twenty page "research" paper for philosophy the night before having read one page from the dude. And got a b+

One of my greatest academic achievements was a very long, in-depth research paper that was assigned on the first day of the semester and due on the last. "Don't put it off until the end," our teacher warned us, "because you won't be able to finish this in a couple of hours. You should be doing a little bit of work on it every week." It was to be deeply-researched, extensively endnoted, and (if I recall correctly) fifty pages long, single-spaced, 10pt.

Except I had a full-time job throughout college, and that semester my schedule found me going to work immediately after that (morning) class, both days, every week. By the time I was off work, the thought of that assignment had left my undiagnosed ADHD brain entirely. The semester melted away like the cotton candy in that raccoon video.

And suddenly the last day of class was approaching. I requested the prior day off of work, figuring that I'd work the whole day on it. Only I made a mistake: I hadn't requested the day before it was due. I had requested the day it was due. I'd be working four full days of work, with classes (and at least one early final exam), and then the paper would be due, and only after that would I have the day to write it.

But you do what you have to, and when you're 19 years old, the vagaries of time and sleep seem almost meaningless to you. I was going to get off work at 6pm, which was 14½ hours before the assignment was due. My university had a 24-hour computer lab, which was good, as it was 2004 and I didn't have internet in my apartment (how did I ever live like that?).

So I went home, ate a quick dinner, and went to school, locking myself into the computer lab at 8:00pm. When I poked my head out the door at 7:30am, the sun was bright and the air slightly crisp; and I held 52 freshly-printed pages in my hand. I was done early (technically) and had beaten the page count (also technically). I felt like I had beaten the Water Temple in Ocarina of Time. I ate breakfast to supplement the copious amounts of Nutty Bars and soda I had consumed overnight, and then I turned the paper in; and as class that morning was "optional," I opted to go home, where I discovered that perhaps time was not so vague at all, nor sleep, and I went unconscious for the rest of the morning and a decent chunk of the afternoon.

A week later, I got my grades back. At that point in any semester I was always beyond caring about how well I had scored, but I looked anyway out of curiosity.

"Well done!" she had written in the notes. "I can tell you really put a lot of time into this. 95/100"

I mean, technically she was right, I had put a lot of time into it: the 11½ hours immediately leading up to my turning it in, to be precise.

Bro I was writing 10+ page papers in Jr High

When I was at a party in college a friend was bumming the vibes because he had an English paper due the following Monday and he was stressed out.

I asked him what the topic was and it was any play studied in the course. I asked him which play he knew best and if I recall correctly it was The Importance of Being Earnest.

I chatted with him for a bit, asked him why he liked the play, what it meant to him, what parts he thought were most important, and what he thought was the ultimate point Wilde was making.

After about a half hour I wrote the outline on the back of a placemat.

Intro: state what point your essay will ultimately try to make, and summarize how you'll get there (1 page).

For each "way" that you'll get there, write three paragraphs: your point, what in the text supports your point, and how that point supports the thesis in the intro. (1.5-2 pages).

Do that for each of the four "ways". (6-8 pages total)

Explain why those dozen paragraphs illustrate and support the claims you made in the introduction.

Suffice it to say, the party roared on, he likely wasn't able to think on Saturday but on Sunday I guess he did a pretty good job of bullshitting his way to nine single spaced pages, and he got a B, which was above average for him in that class.

That structure, intro, points, references, supports statements, conclusion, can literally be blown out into a thesis or even a book, as long as you have a clear idea of what you're trying to say and how you intend to back it up, and you can write coherent (dare to dream, interesting!) prose to explain everything in between.

What people are missing is that that process is actually fun. Trying to figure out how you can make a point in an interesting way that is backed up by references that you can argue in support on your point is actually interesting and fun, you just have to stop thinking about why you can't/won't and just throw yourself at it.

People were writing 10+ page reports before computers. Writing shit by hand.

I had an ethics class in college where we had to write a 10-page capstone paper for part of the final.

The teacher wrote an outline and description for what she wanted, and encouraged everyone to work on it for a few hours a week to make sure they finished it on time.

I waited until the last day of class, banged it out in about an hour and a half, and submitted it around 15 minutes before it was finally due.

Got an A, with a comment about how great the work was. Kids these days.

Shit, I'll write a 10 page paper as an internet reply to a topic I'm only just finding out about.

Just weakness. Everyone knows you write your term paper starting less than 24 hours before the deadline and crank out a fully realized thesis made out of nothing but energy drinks and Adderall

I tried reading Infinite Jest for the first time.

In a pre-LLM world, this kind of word waffling nonsense would seem impressive, but as someone who picked it up to see what it's about in a post-LLM world.... I have few good things to say about this style of pointless writing.

It's something that I used to excel at too: a long litany of rhythmically satisfying prose that showcased your penchant for picking out the perfect words to soothe the literary soul whilst saying absolutely nothing at the same time.

Then I learned how to write to clear English, and realised that I valued plot over filler most of all in a story.

I'm sorry, Mr Wallace, I just can't read your book any more.

I had to use various AIs to create an SOP for one of my courses this year. It was so much more exhausting than just writing one because there's so much you can't trust in it. Almost every section had a very specific reference that I needed to check to be sure it wasn't hallucinating.

Luckily I was supposed to pick one as my favorite, so I chose the one with the fewest specific references, deleted the few it had and generalized them instead.

I vividly remember people writing 10+ page diaries for foreign language classes as homework before home internet was common where I lived.

Tho I will be fair, "lack of internet" was a big reason it was possible. The inherent boredom.

Checked out the necessary books for citations the afternoon before. Chugged an energy drink. One draft submitted before the deadline. Grabbed breakfast. Passed out in class. TWICE.

We used to knock out ten pages at four in the morning without punctuation.

I remember for my senior project in college having done so much work that documenting it at the end resulted in like 30 pages. That was without stetching it. I didn't want to spend any more time than necessary at that point. Kids these days...

With a pencil.