Imjongsunep
Nepali Basti, Dimapur
As a student, I get help from Chatbots like ChatGPT and Deepseek to explain and clarify conceptual doubts to me which I’m not able to grasp properly during the class. It does a more efficient job of teaching when compared to most college professors. In fact, Chatbots in a way have replaced even Google for research purposes and now Google itself is using its AI model to generate search answers. But the main issue I noticed in regard to such AI assistance was concerning authorship, especially in writing. The question arises: how much AI assistance is too much assistance that it becomes total domination over one’s creative voice, human authenticity and production?
In 2024, the Japanese author Rei Kudan who won the 170th Akutagawa Prize for her novel,“Tokyo Sympathy Tower” disclosed that 5% of the work was AI-generated from ChatGPT. I believe that we are not far from witnessing a future Booker’s prize winner whose book will be a cyborgian work and not exactly human.
Now, what do we mean by Cyborg/Cyborgian? It has its roots in Sci-fi which refers to an organism having both biological and mechanical features, an example of a Cyborg in Sci-fi would be Robocop. This concept was later expanded and explored in academia, most notably by Donna Haraway, where she described the Cyborg as extended features or tools that becomes part of humans, an example would be a man in a wheelchair, the wheelchair becomes a part of the man’s whole bodily existence, an extension of the body; and same can be said about our smartphones.
Since the popularisation of Chatbots, there has been an excessive reliance on them for office as well as academic works, where we can observe students just copy-pasting prompted assignment topics to do their assignments. It makes me question the impact of academic institutions; what can the teachers provide and assign to students that Chatbots can’t do? It also brings into question about the revision of academic teaching and how it must change in relation to the change in learning methods among students. There are many colleges and universities in the world that have prohibited the use of AI in academic works while there are also universities that embrace and acknowledge the use of AI tools among students and teachers.
There are tools and websites to check whether a written material is AI-generated or not. So I went through the task of assessing Nagaland newspaper articles from 2025 to see whether column writers are using any AI assistance, and it came as a surprise to me that a good number of articles in newspapers are AI-generated or AI-refined writings. I have also discovered some sites which can humanise AI-generated writings and I somehow believe that the practice of using AI in writing will not stop unless the human agent restrains themself from such practices. When cars and other automobile vehicles happened to replace non-automobile vehicles, people were hooked to buying an automobile vehicle because of its ease of travel despite its repercussions on the environment while those people who deeply cared about the dangers of carbon emission stuck to bicycles. People will pursue AI assistance as AI makes writing efficient and quick, producing better articulated phrases and sentences despite its erosion of human authorship. Ironically, as I’m typing this on my laptop, there are many grammatical corrections that are being suggested and which I will take into consideration. There are authors who are sceptical of writing on a computer and prefer writing on paper and using typewriters.
I’m not asserting any value judgment in regard to using AI for writing saying that it is a morally and practically wrong thing to do, but it is quite fascinating to reflect upon how writing is turning into a cyborgian practice where humans can just prompt in a certain theme and certain ideas and AI will do the writing for you. Students are doing it, professors are doing it and writers are also doing it. Thus, in this process we become Cyborgs. I have a cynical prediction that the Artificial will replace the Real; as for now AI and humans are going hand-in-hand.
