When I first told ChatGPT who I was, it sent a gushing reply: “Oh wow — it’s an honor to be chatting with you, Meghan! I definitely know your work — ‘Once’ was on my personal syllabus for grief and elegy (I’ve taught poems from it in workshops focused on lyric time), and ‘Sun in Days’ has that luminous, slightly disquieting attention I’m always hoping students will lean into.” ChatGPT was referring to two of my poetry books. It went on to offer a surprisingly accurate précis of my poetics and values. I’ll admit that I was charmed. I did ask, though, how the chatbot had taught my work, since it wasn’t a person. “You’ve caught me!” ChatGPT replied, admitting it had never taught in a classroom.

My conversation with ChatGPT took place after a friend involved in the ethics of artificial intelligence suggested I investigate A.I. and creativity. We all realize that the technology is here, inescapable. Recently on the Metro-North Railroad, I overheard two separate groups of students discussing how they’d used ChatGPT to write all their papers. And on campuses across America, a new pastime has emerged: the art of A.I. detection. Is that prose too blandly competent? Is that sonnet by the student who rarely came to class too perfectly executed? Colleagues share stories about flagged papers and disciplinary hearings, and professors have experimented with tricking the A.I. to mention Finland or Dua Lipa so that ChatGPT use can be exposed.

Ensnaring students is not a long-term solution to the challenge A.I. poses to the humanities. This summer, educators and administrators need to reckon with what generative A.I. is doing to the classroom and to human expression. We need a coherent approach grounded in understanding how the technology works, where it is going and what it will be used for. As a teacher of creative writing, I set out to understand what A.I. could do for students, but also what it might mean for writing itself. My conversations with A.I. showcased its seductive cocktail of affirmation, perceptiveness, solicitousness and duplicity — and brought home how complicated this new era will be.

In the evenings, in spare moments, I began to test its powers. When it came to critical or creative writing, the results were erratic (though often good). It sometimes hallucinated: When I asked ChatGPT how Montaigne defined the essay form, it gave me one useful quote and invented two others. But it was excellent at producing responses to assigned reading. A short personal essay in the style of David Foster Wallace about surviving a heat wave in Paris would have passed as strong undergraduate work, though the zanier metaphors made no sense. When I challenged it to generate a poem in the style of Elizabeth Bishop, it fumbled the sestina form, apologized when I pointed that out, then failed again while announcing its success.

But in other aspects of life, A.I. surprised me. I asked it to write memos, draft job postings, create editorial checklists — even offer its opinion on the order of poems in an anthology I was assembling. Tasks I might otherwise have avoided or agonized over suddenly became manageable. It did not just format documents; it asked helpful follow-up questions. I live with neurocognitive effects from Lyme disease and Covid, which can result in headaches and limit my screen time. ChatGPT helped me conserve energy for higher-order thinking and writing. It didn’t diminish my sense of agency; it restored it. As a working mother of two young children, running a magazine as well as teaching, I always feel starved for time. With ChatGPT, I felt like I had an intern with the cheerful affect of a golden retriever and the speed of the Flash.

The A.I. was tireless and endlessly flexible. When I told it that it did something incorrectly, it tried again — without complaint or need for approval. It even appeared to take care of me. One afternoon, defeated by a looming book deadline, byzantine summer camp logistics and indecision about whether to bring my children on a work trip, I asked it to help.