For almost twenty years, Victoria Livingstone taught writing and literature to college students. In the fall of 2024, she stopped. Not because she’d lost interest in teaching, but because something had changed in her classroom that she couldn’t teach around anymore: her students had started outsourcing the thinking that writing was supposed to require.
She wrote about the decision in a Time article called “I Quit Teaching Because of ChatGPT.” It went viral. Within weeks she’d heard from educators across the country who recognized their own classrooms in her story, and from people in tech who wanted to convince her AI was actually good for schools.
This piece is about AI and critical thinking, and what gets lost when a chatbot fills in the blank that used to be yours to fill.
Writing is thinking, not just the record of it
Victoria’s core argument is simple, and it’s the reason the article resonated with so many people. Writing isn’t only the act of putting a thought you already had onto a page. It’s how the thought gets built in the first place.
She described it to Kathryn as a kind of excavation. You start writing with one idea of where a piece is headed, and by the time you finish, the conclusion has changed, because the process of writing surfaced something you didn’t know you thought. That’s not a side effect of writing. For Victoria, it’s the point.
When AI writes the outline or drafts the first pass, that process disappears. The output might look the same. The thinking that would have happened along the way never does.
The comfortable off-ramp
One phrase from the conversation is worth sitting with on its own: Victoria calls AI a “comfortable off-ramp.” Not because it produces bad writing, necessarily, but because it removes the friction that real thinking requires, and most people don’t notice the moment they take the exit.
She’s careful to say this isn’t only about writers like her. It’s about anyone doing work that requires figuring something out: solving a problem, building an argument, deciding what a piece of writing is trying to say. The moment AI takes over that step, you stop finding out what you think. You get an answer instead.
Where AI earns a place
Victoria isn’t opposed to every use of AI. She’ll use it, and encourages colleagues to use it, for purely administrative tasks: compiling data into a report, searching a database, pulling together information she’s still going to read and verify herself.
The line she draws is between search and thought. AI is good at finding things. It’s a poor substitute for figuring things out. If a task is closer to “go get this for me,” AI can help. If it’s closer to “help me understand what I think,” handing it off costs you something you probably want to keep.
The tells, and why they’re getting harder to spot
Victoria and Kathryn also talked through the specific markers of AI-generated writing that both of them, and most careful readers, have learned to spot: the “not X, but Y” construction, the em dash, the rule of three used everywhere. The tricky part, Victoria said, is that some of those patterns are also marks of genuinely good writing. Three examples is often stronger than two. That’s not a tell on its own. It becomes one when a piece leans on it constantly, because a person writing under real constraints doesn’t produce that kind of consistency.
She’s even started questioning her own writing habits because of it, running her own work through AI detectors out of curiosity more than worry.
Why boredom matters more than it gets credit for
Toward the end of the conversation, Victoria connected all of this to something researchers call the default mode network: the part of the brain associated with creativity that activates during unstructured, low-stimulation time. A walk. A shower. Folding laundry.
If AI, or a phone, or anything else fills every open moment, that space disappears. Victoria’s watching this closely with her own daughter, who just finished kindergarten and already reaches for a screen the moment she’s bored. Her instinct, and Kathryn’s, is the same one a lot of parents and business owners are circling right now: some discomfort is doing real work, and it’s worth protecting.
Try This Today
Before you open an AI tool for your next piece of writing, whether it’s a blog post, a client email, or a proposal, spend five minutes outlining it by hand first. Write down what you think the piece needs to say. Then open the AI tool, if you still want to. Notice what’s different when the thinking happens before the tool does, instead of after.