Why a law professor is letting students bring ChatGPT into their writing — rather than trying to shut it out.
Open the news on any given day and you will find someone warning that AI has put everything at risk: college admission essays, graduate entrance exams, even medical licensing tests. The source of the panic is ChatGPT — a chatbot that answers complicated questions with surprisingly polished, full-length prose. Teachers, understandably, fear that students will quietly hand their assignments over to it. The most common response is to retreat to the last century: pen, paper, no connected devices in the exam room. At UCLA, where I teach, there is even talk of writing a ChatGPT ban into the honor code.
I think that is exactly backward. This term I have told the students in my UCLA law course that they may use ChatGPT on their written work. The era in which only a skilled writer could produce skilled writing came to an end in late 2022, and pretending otherwise helps no one. Instead of forbidding tools that save effort and time, we should be showing students how to use them well and honestly.
If they want to stay competitive across a whole career, students need to know how to coax something useful out of an AI tool and how to judge whether what comes back is accurate, original and worth keeping. They need practice weaving machine-generated passages together with their own writing into something coherent. People entering the workforce now will still be working in the 2060s; learning to collaborate with AI — using it to extend rather than replace their own thinking — is a skill they will lean on for decades.
There are practical reasons too, not just pedagogical ones. A ban simply will not hold. Plenty of students, code of honor or not, will reach for AI help. And how would a school even enforce the rule? Detection tools exist, but each new generation of AI gets better at sounding human — eventually good enough to imitate the particular voice of the student using it. In that contest the writing tools will always stay a step ahead of the tools built to catch them.
Enforcement also guarantees injustice in both directions. Some students who break the ban will slip through, either by luck or by editing the output carefully enough. Others who did nothing wrong will be wrongly flagged — and forced to defend themselves against an accusation that carries real stress and real consequences.
But doesn’t learning to write teach something deeper than writing itself? It does. Building an essay from nothing forces slow, deliberate thinking about structure, flow and how to make a point land. Yet blending your own words with AI-generated text into a genuinely good piece demands those same disciplines. The hard thinking does not disappear; it moves.
Writing is a craft worth real respect, and few of us ever truly master it. But most students are not aiming to become professional writers. They are heading into careers where writing is a means to an end — to explain, persuade, record, request, convince. Used well, AI tools help them do all of that better, not worse.
When I was in school in the late 1970s and early ’80s, I was told that getting ahead meant good penmanship and the ability to do long division by hand. By the time I started working at the end of the ’80s, technology had made both irrelevant. Schools change slowly — many still drill children on long division, a skill they will never use outside a classroom. With AI writing, educators should get ahead of the curve rather than trailing it by decades.
So my goal is to prepare students for a world where AI is just another ordinary tool, not a novelty. And I am clear with them about the trade: they are fully responsible for anything submitted under their name. If it contains errors, that is on them. If it is poorly organized, that is on them. If it contradicts itself, that is on them. And if it is partly copied, then they have plagiarized — full stop.
In short, I want my students to become aware, accountable users of technologies that will shape the rest of their working lives. The writing, you might say, is already on the wall.
This is an opinion and analysis piece; the views expressed are the author’s own.
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