Note from the Editors

A fairly seismic shift has taken place since the publication of Fresh Writing’s previous issue a year ago. It was late in the fall semester of 2022: the Notre Dame community was heading into its final weeks, when suddenly reports started coming out about a new online program that could, when prompted, create text that replicated, with astonishing legibility and accuracy, human writing. It went by the name “ChatGPT,” and as many of us were soon to discover, it was only one of several examples of what are called “large language models” (LLMs), tools that scrape vast amounts of text, primarily from the internet, and generate responses to prompts based off of patterns of language it recognizes in the text it analyzes.

The writing was on the wall: we were now in the age of generative AI. And generative AI sure sounded a lot like humans.

Maybe, however, it is more accurate to say that a fairly seismic event only seems to have taken place, since, as of fall 2023, with the release of this new issue of Fresh Writing—its 23rd volume—the impacts of generative AI on our world (and on the world of writing) are still unclear, a topic of much debate. Will it make us more efficient workers, or, like the internet, will it just mean we work more? Will it replace human labor, and, if so, in what fields? Should students shift their focus of study? Will students use ChatGPT to write their papers? Will teachers use it to teach their lessons? Will volume 23 of Fresh Writing be the last to publish essays without any intervention from generative AI (presuming, of course, that it is)?

Regarding that last question: we hope not. We hope not because we, the editors, feel strongly that writing—writing, that is, that matters—is a distinctly human practice. There are some basic philosophical reasons for this: for example, LLMs lack the ability to reflect on, interrogate, or think critically about the language they generate, and so by definition what they do is not “writing” but rather “text-generation.” But even more importantly: in not having the ability to think critically, generative AI lacks the very skills that we use to grow and develop—intellectually, emotionally, culturally, spiritually—through our writing. In other words, they lack the very skills that bring about greater humanity, both within and between ourselves. It is this humanizing effect of writing that we see so beautifully on display in this year’s issue.

We see it, for example, in one writer’s celebration of her Mexican heritage and in another’s struggle to ally his English and his Nigerian identities. We see it, too, in the radical honesty with which our students look to the past, in moments of pain, in illness, and sometimes, with a sense of humor. We see it in the power of human connection as when one student narrates the deepening of her relationship with her father and another grieves the sudden passing of his friend. We see it in one student’s greater appreciation for bamboo, and in another’s wish to take measures to better protect the environment. We see it in the work of historical reclamation enacted by essays about systemic racism and an unjustly forgotten Catholic biologist. We see it, even, in the writers who are grappling with the impacts of technology on their lives: on digital experience, on software engineering, and on AI translators themselves. And we see it in those who write with the aid of more contemporary technologies, in multimodal genres like the podcast and the video essay.

Finally, we see it in our award-winning essays this year: those Snite Award winners who, in their encounter with art, bear witness to the history of redlining, the paradox of the American Dream, and the imagined story of a mother and her child. And we see it in those winners of our esteemed McPartlin Award, who seem to call on their readers to practice—as they do in their own writing—a greater ethic of compassion, whether it be in setting the record straight on the documented lives of a so-called “eccentric” mother and daughter, in generating more support for first-generation students, or in proposing a means to keep one author’s community intact.

Altogether, the essays in this year’s Fresh Writing—as in every year’s Fresh Writing—are not merely a document of first-year writing; they are a document of why our first-year students write. And, as these essay’s attest, there is no greater catalyst than the human experience.