With DeepSeek, do I still need to learn writing?

At the end of 2024, on the eve of the launch of the large model, Liang Wenfeng, the founder of DeepSeek, posted this sentence in his circle of friends. Soon after, it became a reality. At the beginning of this year, the series of models launched by DeepSeek amazed the world!

Many people exclaimed that artificial intelligence will replace humans! Faced with the all-round challenges from artificial intelligence, many people have educational confusion. Software can generate a beautiful article in an instant, so do we still need to learn to write?

American educator Dewey once said: "If we still educate today's children in the same way as yesterday, we are undoubtedly robbing them of their tomorrow." We might as well understand the meaning and value of learning from a new perspective and create a better tomorrow for our children.

The deeper value of writing education goes beyond teaching technology

If writing education in the past was limited to imitating rhetoric and writing style, today we should go beyond simple techniques and regard writing as a training of thinking. As the Swiss psychologist Piaget said, "The purpose of education is to create people who can innovate, create, discover and invent, rather than simply repeat what their predecessors have done."

When educating children to write an article, it is not only about learning rich vocabulary, but also about cultivating their observation and thinking abilities. The arduous process of extracting unique individual experiences and precious emotions from memory rebuilds the brain's neural circuits, which is a cognitive evolution that cannot be replicated by AI data training.

Therefore, we should regard writing teaching as a tool for individual emotional and personality growth. Learning to express emotions and reconstruct memory fragments through writing is an important process of emotional healing, an awakening of self-cognition, and an irreplaceable growth fission.

Transformation of writing teaching methods

In the face of artificial intelligence, parents and teachers must quickly transform from authoritative output of knowledge to learning partners when facing children and students. In the process of learning, teachers and students, and parents and children, jointly inherit cultural genes and experience the resonance of life, creating a precious memory.

For example, the writer Lu Zhi not only trained her own child to become a writer, but also helped more children go from hating writing to loving writing. This was because she changed her teaching position, from a text judge to a growth witness, cheering for the children's every step of growth, and establishing a writing growth file for each student, which not only included excellent essays, but also cherished those drafts with traces of erasures.

"A gentleman is not born different, but is good at using things." Educators also need to be aware of using tools. Teachers and parents can use artificial intelligence to help children write in three steps. First, use tools to expand ideas in the conception stage; second, use tools to search for information when writing the first draft, but do not use software directly to write; third, use multiple software to compare and modify in the optimization stage, and you can also use software to check for duplicates and eliminate plagiarism. It is possible that the article modified by the software is full of machine flavor and lacks human touch. Therefore, the evaluation criteria for writing should pay more attention to the uniqueness of thinking, the authenticity of emotions, and the originality of expression.

Whether parents or teachers, they can all write with their children and share their thinking process. This real creative example will be more contagious than theory.

Cherish the unique emotions of human beings

While using the tools, writers need to build confidence. If writing in the past still came from the accumulation of simple experience, then in the AI ​​era, writing teaching can quickly draw on excellent texts, and software including DeepSeek will show the thinking process, so it is possible to compare human and machine writing. Because the strength of the machine lies in the logical presentation, but this logic is not a unique creation, but a summary of big data.

We can educate our children to value individual emotions and recognize that AI is good at neat structures but lacks embodied experiences such as "warmth".

When writing this article, I also asked DeepSeek: What is the difference between you and a real writer? Then I got this answer: "I can calculate to the infinite decimal places of π, but I can't understand why humans are heartbroken by the moonlight and why they cry for cherry blossoms. This is precisely your most precious loophole."

The rhetoric of artificial intelligence always cruises within the known language continental shelf, while the creations of Shakespeare, Li Bai, and Cao Xueqin are the pioneering of cognitive frontiers - just like a climber using an ice pick to carve a new path on a cliff instead of walking along an existing plank road. Artificial intelligence can reorganize the grammatical structure of the best works, but it can never touch the glimmer of human nature.

In the face of the rapid development of technology, whether we are learning to write or other skills, we do not need to feel inferior, but should cherish our individual and unique experiences. The true meaning of education is not to resist or embrace technology, but to cultivate thinkers, expressers and creators who always shine with the glory of humanity.

(The author Li Zhengrong is the deputy editor-in-chief of Beijing Daily Publishing House and an education science writer)