AAP 2026 CONFERENCE

While writing aids like Grammarly promise to improve students’ work, they also marginalise the role played by teachers. To grasp the scope and implications of this problem, I turn to one of the earliest accounts of the good of learning and teaching we have, the Xunzi. This early Confucian text identifies two key components of the social value of education, which services like Grammarly threaten to undermine: the importance of learning proper models, li (禮), for self-expression and of accruing active effort, wei (為), in one’s studies.

While Grammarly can correct work to a tolerable standard, it does not teach proper models, which risks making students reliant on it not only to express themselves but to understand their work without its help. Moreover, while Grammarly primarily helps students to capitalise on the effort they do put into their studies by offering them significant shortcuts that again leave them dependent on this software. If AI writing aids risk making students more exploitable like this in turn for an easier time in the classroom, then we ought to be extremely worried about the genuine possibility that students, and perhaps even institutions, will delegate teaching responsibilities to this software.