“Every professor I know wasted countless hours of 2024 in the prevention or detection of AI-powered cheating. It is a miserable war of attrition that seems doomed to defeat. Perhaps the time has come, then, to declare a strategic withdrawal from writing as pedagogy?” That’s Regina Rini (York) in the Times Literary Supplement. She observes that “the problem is double-barrelled; writing has simultaneously become less valuable and much harder to teach.” On the first point, about the perceived value of writing: few students will need to compose essays after leaving school. Think of the adults you know [besides your fellow humanities academics]… When was the last time they needed to write an argument longer than a social media reply? Probably not more recently than the last time they did long division by hand. Now try to persuade the arriving generation of college students—nearly 90 per cent of whom admit to using ChatGPT for “help” with high-school homework, according to a recent survey in the US—that writing is a skill they must internalize for future success. Brace for eyeroll impact. An ever-increasing share of adults will regard AI writing tools as just more productivity apps on their phone, no more sensible to abjure than calculators. And on the difficulty of teaching writing: As for the other side—the terrible cost for educators struggling to hold the line against AI cheating—at stake is the personal indignity of seeing one’s time treated as worthless…. Reading with the care of a surgeon, trying to get inside a student’s head and guess why they used that inappropriate word or missed this obvious argumentative strategy, calibrating advice for varietals of arrogance and fragility—none of this is easy or quick. And all is wasted on a student who cheats by submitting work they did not compose. A pedagogical future of thousands of hours analysing the semantic output of uneducable robots sounds like a particularly sadistic existentialist hell. What to do? Are you still teaching writing? How are you doing it? For which kinds of classes? If not, what are you doing instead? Does this seem like a big loss because it really is one, or because we (I?) lack the foresight or imagination to see the overwhelming benefits? We..