Greg Palermo
@palermog.bsky.social
919 followers 916 following 183 posts
Assistant Teaching Prof, Emory University Writing Program & Affiliated Faculty, Data Science. Citation, data, & disciplinary rhetoric. Co-editor, JITP Reviews. 📷🎾☕️🎹. Opinions mine. he/they
![I stared at my terminal facing those red error messages that I hate to see. An AWS [Ama-
zon Web Services] error glared back at me. I didn’t want to figure it out without AI’s
help.
After 12 years of coding, I’d somehow become worse at my own craft. And this isn’t
hyperbole—this is the new reality for software developers.
Namanyay Goel (2025, n.p.)
To show how serious the situation has become, one need only think about our last round of mark-
ing essays by AI undergraduate students. What jumps out of the page, for us, is something that con-
tradicts the rhetoric our colleagues promote, namely, it is evident that students need moreessay work
assigned to them, not less (Kosmyna et al. 2025). Almost every essay was poor on some dimension
that does not befit students in their final years of undergraduate study: the writing is often super-
ficial, the language does not reflect students’ stage and knowledge, citations are frequently misused,
and (most shockingly because it is so easy), the reference style is not applied correctly. This means that
the constellation of skills required to write a good academic essay has not been nurtured enough or
has atrophied. What this means is also that regardless of factual LLM use by the students, their ability
to write essays is on the floor, and not, as many seem to claim, at ceiling where one cannot differentiate
a good essay from a plagiarised or otherwise dishonest attempt of an essay. Importantly, the training
of writing skills should be done in the context of critical reckoning with the norms and pressures sur-
rounding the work expected of students (i.e. high study load, so-called student excellence, financial
pressure to graduate, etc.).
In this context, it is also important to be wary of arguments that wrongly position LLMs as, mak-
ing education more democratic, accessible, and equitable by removing language barriers, removing
unequal access to mentorship, and increase diversity, equity and inclusion in…](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:vsyj5jtayxcq5dw5mtja4xtb/bafkreie6lfs3vpc2khuwi4svntmokuyboprhexi6tnkk2jarmpbez6agn4)
