The Core texts are the texts covered in Boston University's Core Curriculum sequence. These interesting texts can teach us a lot about the role of AI in writing. In this essay, I will discuss three of these texts: Michel de Montaigne's "On the Education of Children," Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote, and Immanuel Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. I will argue that these texts can be closely connected to the role AI can play in our writing.
In "On the Education of Children," Michel de Montaigne discusses how students should not just be taught how to memorize, but how to actually critically think for themselves. Montaigne says that education should be conducted with a "firm gentleness," so that the student is oriented properly but is still pushing themselves to study what they want. This is very closely related to AI since AI takes the aspect of critical thinking away from the person using it, and just gives them boilerplate answers.
Don Quixote, on the other hand, expresses this connection more subtly through the character of Sansón Carrasco. Carrasco is a university student with a bachelor's degree, referring to himself by the title "Bachelor." In Part Two of the text, Carrasco notes that the interpolated stories in Part One that didn't focus on Don Quixote, the main character, were useless in the text. Here, Cervantes portrays Carrasco as doing a surface reading of Part One of the text, which can be tied to AI in the way that it can summarize texts from its training data, but not examine them closely or build connections on them in the way a human could.