Re: this post, I wrote to another friend: “I spent decades teaching students to write critical essays. I talked and wrote a great deal about what makes a good thesis, what makes good evidence, how to avoid the mechanistic formulae students were taught in high school, etc. And here at the end of my career I have stopped doing all that, because, thanks to chatbots, almost no university students will ever again write their own critical essays. This change feels like a liberation and an abdication at the same time.”