Has AI cost academia the joy of text?

We have sleepwalked into an era in which the joy of text has slowly and silently been taken away from us. The arrival of large language models (LLMs) has impacted all aspects of academic life, but the permeation of AI has particularly affected the part that includes shaping arguments, polishing prose and turning thinking into words.

This piece is a dialogue between four academics who relate to writing differently but who share a concern that something vital is being lost.

‘My linguistic anxiety has been exacerbated’

Before joining academia, I was told that if you don’t like writing, don’t bother applying for a PhD. The psychological torture of writing was accepted as a sine qua non of academic life: doubts, feelings of unworthiness and an impostor syndrome that we learn to live with. I am not saying I miss that. What I miss is knowing that writing born out of hard labour meant something and the sense of satisfaction from a paragraph that clearly and concisely articulates my thoughts. AI is taking the joy out of writing just as efficiency narratives remove the joy of thinking through writing, the joy of polishing a draft and chipping away at it as meaning reveals itself. 

As a second-language speaker I have lost trust in my own voice. The linguistic anxiety that has plagued me for most of my adult life has been exacerbated. If AI can write better than me, why even start? Have I become redundant? I am not advocating a return to the old days, but I am grieving the joy that once existed inside the struggle of writing.

Viktoria Magne 

What I do: I delay polishing and resolution, staying in messy drafts and uncertainty long enough for real ideas to form.

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‘Writing creates a world where people are heard and remembered’

Many academics understand writing not as a technical skill or as a means of knowledge transmission, but as a task through which meaning, voice and intellectual presence are hardened. Writing creates a world where people can be seen, heard and remembered. Without this, suggested historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt, humans may live but they do not fully exist politically. She argued that a world would be lost if speech became meaningless and people were reduced to data points or cases. 

So, the important question is not whether we use AI but whether it contributes to or erodes world-building. It supports world-building when it scaffolds thinking, dialogue and articulation rather than replacing them. For many, it can serve as a tool for speaking “academic-ese” and participating in, rather than bypassing, the world of academia. It is world-building when it amplifies distinct voices rather than smoothing everything into a flattened Western academic voice. The purpose of education (through the lens of Arendtian thinking) is to sustain a world where people can appear as thinking and speaking beings, be seen and heard by others who are different, and test ideas in public without it collapsing into sameness. 

Rebecca Mace

What I do: I treat AI as something that talks back to my thinking rather than producing text for me. If AI takes over authorship, dialogue is lost and the judgement is no longer mine. 

‘AI gets me through writing I don’t want to do’

I love the act of writing: using a fountain pen, making spelling mistakes, letting ideas take time. I love pencil cases, coloured pens, sticky notes. I love choosing how my writing looks. I love the pause that allows a thought to form. That is where joy is for me – not in output but in ownership.

Yet, that is not how most of my writing exists. Much of it happens under constraint: work, time, the sense that writing is something I have to do rather than something I choose. There isn’t time to mull things over, to let ideas settle, to imagine or feel them fully. Writing becomes about getting something done. Under those conditions, joy becomes harder to access.

This is where AI enters my writing life. AI helps me get through writing I don’t want to do: reports, feedback, administrative texts. It speeds things up. It lessens the pain. 

If writing slowly, imperfectly or playfully is no longer something we allow ourselves to do, perhaps joy slips away. AI, in being positioned as faster, cleaner and more authoritative, may deepen that loss.

Sarah Hooper

What I do: I’m learning that I need to think and triage first, and when something truly needs my voice, that’s when I put pen to paper. That’s where my most creative and joyful writing lives.

‘Joy is lost when AI replaces parts of me in the research process’

I often use AI to support writing that demands quick completion or specific responses or is simply unappealing. I might turn to AI for ideas about how to incorporate impact or how to broaden the methods in a research proposal, for example. However, using AI in such a manner has often left me feeling flat and unfulfilled. This is not “cheating” – I always follow guidance about AI use in the preparation of such documents. It may instead be about my voice as a researcher, how I am losing something of my background that gives birth to my ideas around my research. 

I have experienced the joy that comes from positioning words in an order that exactly conveys what is in my head, from the agony of deciphering academic work (I’m looking at you, Judith Butler) and expressing it in a manner that I (and I hope others) can understand. Academic writing is a creative endeavour. Given the established links between being creative and well-being, it is perhaps unsurprising that academic writing can bring emotional reward and satisfaction. The heterogeneity of academia is worth fighting to preserve. 

Sharon Vince

What I do: Use AI only for burdensome tasks that would otherwise take attention away from creative processes, and save the messy but rewarding writing, research and teaching for yourself.

Less optimisation, more imperfect and human

Retaining joy in academic writing is less about optimisation and more about deciding what we are willing to protect. Rather than asking what writing can be outsourced to AI, we might begin by asking which parts of the process need to remain slow, imperfect and human. For some, joy comes from pausing, thinking, discovering and learning to trust oneself; for others, from collaboration, vulnerability and sitting with uncertainty before ideas are resolved. 

Practically, this means resisting the urge to use AI too early in the writing process, where it can erase the writer’s presence before meaning has had time to form. Instead, AI can be used for tasks that do not require positionality or lived experience, creating time and space for writing that does bring joy. Defending slowness, messiness and effort in writing is not inefficiency but a necessary condition for work that still feels meaningful, personal and worth doing.

Viktoria Magne is an associate professor in education studies and early childhood, Sharon Vince is a senior lecturer in education, and Sarah Hooper is a senior lecturer in early years education, all in the School of Human and Social Sciences at the University of West London. Rebecca Mace is a senior lecturer in education at the University of Worcester.

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