The writing is irrelevant. Who cares if students don't learn how to do it? Or if the magazines are all mostly generated a decade from now? All of that labor spent on writing wasn't really making economic sense.
The problem with that take is this: it was never about the act of writing. What we lose, if we cut humans out of the equation, is writing as a proxy for what actually matters, which is thinking.
You'll soon notice the downsides of not-thinking (at scale!) if you have a generation of students who weren't taught to exercise their thinking by writing.
I hope that more people come around to this way of seeing things. It seems like a problem that will be much easier to mitigate than to fix after the fact.
A little self-promo: I'm building a tool to help students and writers create proof that they have written something the good ol fashioned way. Check it out at https://itypedmypaper.com and let me know what you think!
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