AI, Writing, and Third Person Decisions

“Good morning, students,” Mr. Ruff said as the bustle of backpacks and chats subsided. “Good morning, Cecilia.”

His sophomores sat with their old-style composition notebooks at the ready. Charles had never experienced resistance to using them during his long career at MidWest Public Prep. He’d used them throughout his teaching, lending a quaint air to his pedagogy. Spring semester 2023, the beginning of those dark forces of AI, these notebooks were resurrected everywhere. He suspected stock in the notebook industry was up.

“So today, as you know if you’ve looked at the syllabus recently which is, I remind you, online, we shall begin to explore the fascinating world of the third person. What do you know about the third person?” he asked.

The feeling tone dampened noticeably. Dejected looks, sagging shoulders, bodies sinking into seats. Christine raised a tentative hand.

“Grammar, you mean?” she asked. “Personal pronouns?”

“Why, yes, that’s one way of looking at it.”

Ruff knew the students had studied the significant role of the third person in academic text last year. A preference for the third person “one” among the faculty made the third person significant. Every freshman took a semester of Academic Language and Literacy, including a thorough review of grammar and syntax. They learned the appropriate way one ought to write one’s essays.

He didn’t know how deeply their study had penetrated but would soon find out.

*****

“Thank you, Christine,” he continued. “Let’s look at grammar. What do you know about personal pronouns? Why should we care about personal pronouns? I personally find them absolutely key to understanding the human condition.”

Max, a heavy-set kid, cracked a grin and shook his head.

“Max, why are you grinning? You don’t find personal pronouns important?” Charles asked.

“Look, Mr. Ruff, I know you’re trying to get us ready for an elite college, I mean, that’s why my parents insisted I come here,” Max said. “I think this class is going to be, uh, interesting. But, like, I me my mine, you your yours, he, she, it just ain’t the key to the human condition. One must not exaggerate.”

“Thank you, Max. I’m willing to make a bet with you,” Charles said. “Let’s take a vote. How many of you believe Max is right, that I’m overstating the value of personal pronouns?”

Well over half the class raised their hand.

“That’s most of you. Max, I’ll bet you on your honor that I can change your mind. If I lose, I will give you the podium to explain why I’m wrong. If I win, I’ll turn to you to explain why you were wrong. Bet?”

Of course it was a bet.

*****

“I have three points I want you to consider,” Charles began. “Please take notes for future reference.

First, personal pronouns are involved in structuring and restructuring human relations—and human relations are part of the human condition. In your notes you might want to label your notes ‘Personal Pronouns’ and indicate that point 1 is ‘structuring human relations.’

Second, personal pronouns provide us with a system for communicating about others not present or acknowledged—the absence-presence function.

Third, personal pronouns give us a tool for transforming human beings into objects for mental manipulation—the object function.

Now turn to your neighbors and compare notes. When I assign you a letter grade at the end of the course, if you choose to, you can submit your notes to me as part of the evidence of your engagement with the ideas of the course. Engagement is important.”

Charles left the podium and circulated among the class. Many students called him over to have a look at their notes or to ask a question about one or another of his points.

As he expected, the third-person pronoun caused some confusion. Several students had deduced that function one, structuring human relations, refers to the whole system. Function two, within-group communication, was less clear to them, i.e., first and second person constitute a pair or a group in the act of direct address.

Function three, the objectivizing of people, didn’t land solidly with them. He touched bases with Max and shook hands on the bet.

*****

“Let’s begin at the beginning, the first person—I and all of its inflected forms. Here I am relying on a philosopher named Martin Buber. B-U-B-E-R.

Languages throughout the world have a first person pronoun for each speaker, and a second-person pronoun for each listener. I exist as an individual, a self-contained human being, and therefore I can say I. I exist in relation to You. If there were no You, there could be no need for I, just as if there were no I, there would be no need for You. I exist as a human being in relation to You. Where I end, you begin.

That’s the structuring function of the first and second person pronoun. Please raise your hand if you need a different explanation.”

No one had a question, but there was a lot of scribbling in notebooks, which Ruff took as a good sign.

“The relationship between I and You is inherently personal whether we are familiar with one another or not. When I speak to you, and you hear me, you speak to me even if your response is only in your mind. Genuine human interactions require an I and a You. Yes, Sarah.”

“I am me,” she insisted. “I don’t understand why I need you to exist. Here I am. Where are you?”

“I think I get what she’s trying to say—no offense, Mr. Ruff,” said Randall. “It’s confusing, I am I because You are You. Is it that we wouldn’t need the pronoun I without You? I would be all there is. Just a bunch of I’s with no You’s. We wouldn’t need the first person.”

“I agree with that,” said Max.

“Would you like to take the podium now and finish for me?” Charles said with a smile.

The class erupted with laughter.

“Buber believed that my awareness of you as a whole human being with a life as full and complex as my own without stripping away what makes you yourself or turning you into an object is part of being human. We’ll explore the ideas of reduction and objectification in a moment.”

“Let me ask you, do you think it’s possible to meet another person as a whole being in writing?”

Another rapid fire discussion took place.

“I don’t think so,” one student said. “We would have to be face to face.”

“But not if it’s just a matter of communication,” another said, “I don’t see why it has to be face to face.”

“I agree,” chimed in a third voice. “It depends on how open you are with one another, how hard you try to understand each other, not on being face to face.”

“Think about writing in the I-You mode and then shift from the first and second person relationship to the first and third person relationship. Third person is of course he, she, and it. Let’s focus on It. If I were writing a piece in an I-It relationship, how would it differ from writing in an I-You relationship?”

“That reminds me of gender pronouns,” someone said.

“Nobody has the right to force someone else into a gender category,” someone else said.

“Excellent point,” Charles said. “If I am writing and the only pronoun choices I have are he or she, I’m reducing you from a whole human being to a man or a woman. But who am I leaving out? I’m also seeing you as an object, male or female. The result is dehumanizing.”

“My teacher last year said the English language is all about indoctrinating us to believe we have only two choices predetermined by biology. It’s really nobody’s business. So something had to change—either change the pronouns or cave in to religion. It’s disrespectful to call someone ‘he’ who identifies herself as ‘she.’”

“We could spend more time on the gender issue,” Charles said. “In the interest of time, I want you to think more broadly about how pronouns structure our relationships in ways that obligate writers to take up an attitude toward the reader as either a You or an It. The I-You relation is personal, involving whole selves in a give and take. Right now, I am speaking to you—you are still you to me even though you are a group. Do you think it would matter if I thought of you as ‘it’?”

“What do you mean?” someone asked.

“For example, right now, I’m thinking about what I might say to you, Sarah, not to a category of humans like to a female, not to an object like a name on a roster. I’m very interested in your learning to find your writing voice in this class. Do you see a difference?”

“Sort of…”

“If I were speaking about this same topic to a video recorder, I might be thinking what can I say to it, to the recorder. When I think about You and I, my mindset is different. We share our humanity. We each have a voice. When I think about me and a video camera, in my mindset humanity could just disappear. It’s really about ways of thinking.”

“How about this,” someone said. It could have been Max. “Suppose you were being recorded, but you knew I would be listening to the recording. Let’s say you were recording for this class to view.”

“Precisely,” Charles said. “I would be thinking of you. What’s important is what is happening in our minds, not whether we are physically present together. We could be together in the same room, and I could still look at you as an it, a male or female, a young adult, a student—an object in a category.”

“I get it,” Michael said. “When we treat other people like pawns in a game of chess.”

“Good analogy,” Mr. Ruff said. “The I communicates about or with a You not as a whole human being but as a thing, an It. The I-It relationship is necessary for everyday functioning and scientific understanding, and there is a place for it in ordinary life, but it can lead to a dehumanized view of the world if it becomes a mindset, and it can destroy any voice in complex writing.”

*****

Mr. Ruff looked at the clock. He had just ten minutes to pull together and focus the discussion on the take-away.

“In this course, which is after all a writing course, we’ll talk about two kinds of writing. I-It writing focuses solely on technical aspects of content and language, treating text-making as a tool for utilitarian purposes. The best writing is clear, readable, accurate, and functional. I-Thou writing engages deeply with the subject matter in an attempt to share attitudes, emotions, and nuances, using writing as a form of dialogue or self-discovery, creating texts with a sense of presence and authenticity.”

He saw lots of scribblers scribbling. He would collect their notes from the session to scan for a close look at their collective thinking.

“As you know, I’ve decided to integrate instruction and practice in effective ways to use large language models like ChatGPT during class assignments, including writing. The first major point we need to understand is this: Effective and appropriate uses of AI in writing are very different, depending on whether the task is an I-It piece of writing or an I-You piece of writing.”

He paused and, seeing no signs of a question, continued.

“LLMs can be appropriately viewed as tools to be used for specific tasks in I-It writing. This is a key point so listen carefully: Before turning your attention away from writing an I-It piece to working with a bot, be clear about why you are using the tool and what you expect to gain. Going fishing with a bot for something to say is not only ethically problematic, but it also reduces the amount of human in ‘I.’

Cutting and pasting huge pieces of text from a bot changes the writing from ‘I-It’ to ‘It-It.’ A machine writing for an object or a category. I’ll be monitoring your uses of this tool in I-It assignments through metacognitive log entries and giving you my feedback. I’ll collect them from time to time. Your log entries can be submitted as evidence of learning for my consideration when I must record a final grade for you.”

“It’s unclear what legitimate role AI can play in I-You writing. We will explore the possibility of AI tools in an I-You writing tasks later in the semester. Asking a bot to direct you or to rescue you at any point in I-You writing risks transformation of the piece from an I-You piece to an It-You. Notice that inappropriate or unwise uses of the bot always damages the I, transforming the I into an It. Relying on LLMs to write for you will over time diminish You to an It as a writer.”

*****

With a few minutes remaining, Charles turned to Max.

“What’s your conclusion, Max? Do you agree with me that personal pronouns are key to understanding the human condition?”

“I have to think about it some more, but, yeah, yeah it makes sense. Like, it matters whether I think about you as an it. It matters not just in writing, but in life, which I guess is what you mean by the human condition.”