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After years of studying how humans write, cognitive psychologist Ronald T. Kellogg concluded that drafting a basic persuasive essay was as mentally taxing as digging a ditch was physically exhausting.

Writing well requires a command of vocabulary, spelling, and grammar. It forces writers to comprehend a subject, to sift through their working memory of that topic, to organize and plan. Writing an essay is so difficult that a person in the throes of it can do hardly anything else — as anyone who has shushed a spouse or child while trying to compose a decent sentence can attest.

Very few people would volunteer to dig a ditch. Likewise, it is hard — almost impossible, many English teachers will admit — to turn a reluctant writer into an enthusiastic one.

Yet the American education system expects nearly all students to learn how to write an essay. It’s little wonder, then, that as soon as a tool arrived promising to lessen the pain people grabbed it.

Like it or not, artificial intelligence is now firmly embedded in how students produce text. Somewhere between two-thirds and 90% of high school and college students are already using AI for schoolwork, according to recent surveys, often requesting help with writing assignments.

A growing number of educators are alarmed, and insist that students should write without AI. These teachers are returning to handwriting, blue books, and proctored, in-class essay tests — all attempts to prevent students from outsourcing their writing to chatbots.

This is baffling to tech industry leaders, who see AI rejection as a form of educational malpractice. They point out that writing is already the leading use of AI in the workplace, and argue there is no need to continue suffering through the task without help. After all, they say, chatbots now exceed the ability of most humans to produce fluent prose.

All this points to some questions about writing itself: Why work so hard to learn it? And what do students stand to lose when they stop facing down a blank page, alone with their thoughts?

The scholars who study writing and cognition are rarely reflexively opposed to AI. Many have spent decades anticipating a leap in computer-assisted writing, just like the one we are living through. They tend to be excited by the technology’s potential.

Still, their work casts doubt on the tech-industry push to embed AI at every stage of the student writing process, from brainstorming to drafting to revising. Research shows that traditional, unassisted composition is valuable, not despite its difficulty, but because of it. Writing builds our working memory, executive planning skills, and metacognition — the ability to think about our thinking, weigh alternate viewpoints, and revise for clarity and style. It takes decades to develop writing skills, from toddlerhood into adulthood.

“Writing is a technology for thinking,” Kellogg said.

Writing substitute or helper?

Learning to write did not always matter so much.

Before the 1870s, American students were tested through oral exams. College seats were reserved for the elite — future ministers and lawyers, professions where public speaking dominated.

But the rise of the modern, urban economy, and the invention of the typewriter, produced jobs that dealt more heavily with the written word, like office clerks and advertising copywriters. Starting in the late 19th century, students needed to learn how to write more fluently, and school curriculums, tied closely to the demands of industry, adapted. As more students went to college, and class sizes grew, administering oral tests also became too time-consuming, according to linguist Naomi S. Baron, who traces this history in her book Who Wrote This?

Besides, teachers discovered that writing itself deepened knowledge. “If you want to think, understand, and learn something, text really is preferable,” Baron said.

Cognitive research confirms that writing is a powerful aid in helping us to retain information we read. The work of writing forces us to stress-test our ideas, allowing the writer to respond to counterarguments and cite sources. Revision is a practice of self-critique and self-improvement, and can be social, as well, if feedback is elicited. Writing can also be empowering, allowing us to share our experiences and express our views. It can even be healing, which is why therapists sometimes suggest keeping a journal.

It is not clear if these benefits can be fully realized when writing alongside artificial intelligence. There are reasons to be wary.

Last year, a small study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology showed that individuals who wrote in partnership with AI chatbots recorded lower brain activity while they wrote, compared with those who worked without chatbots. The writers who used AI struggled to remember what, exactly, they had written, and felt little ownership over their work.

The findings join a growing body of research suggesting that frequent AI use can degrade critical thinking.

Nevertheless, tech companies are aggressively marketing AI writing assistants to students and schools.

Jenny Maxwell, general manager for education at Superhuman, the AI company that makes the popular writing app Grammarly, told me we are living through a “burn it down” moment for teaching and learning. Educators who try to withhold AI writing tools are essentially announcing to their students — “consumers,” she called them — that their coursework is irrelevant to the job market.

She did acknowledge that some basic, human writing skills remain valuable. Students need to write well enough to have a sense of which AI text suggestions to accept and which to reject, she said. Maxwell also insisted that creativity in writing would persist, because people would still want to express their personal voice and style.

To that end, companies such as Grammarly, Google, and OpenAI are creating so-called Socratic versions of their chatbots, sold to schools as writing helpers that will guide students through assignments without doing the work for them.

The need for limits

AI is already ubiquitous: on every device, in every web search, insisting that it can summarize for us, analyze for us, write for us. It steps in even when we have not invited it.

For students with still-developing minds, the most urgent question, then, is how to protect thinking in a world where it has become so easy to outsource writing.

We might begin by considering what AI is actually good at when it comes to composition. AI can be especially useful for those with disabilities or who are non-native English speakers, said Steve Graham, a writing expert and educational psychologist at Arizona State University. Chatbots can correct grammar and suggest potential trims or revisions for clarity. With AI, there have been immense strides in accurate voice-to-text transcription for writers who cannot physically type or write by hand.

And AI can offer all of this help privately, with no need to be vulnerable and expose a rough first draft to another person’s judgment. For many American students, especially the third with below-basic literacy skills, the writing process can be painful and embarrassing, and a reason many dread homework and exams.

But, Graham cautioned, there is no part of the writing process that can be handed over to AI without some cost. Intellectual growth occurs at every stage, from brainstorming to fine-tuning a final draft. If writing is thinking, then any part of the struggle that is outsourced to technology amounts to relinquishing some freedom to perceive. How will students ever know what they really think of anything — whether it’s The Crucible or AI itself — if they ask a machine to spit out an answer for them?

Last year, a group of writing experts, including Graham, assembled at the University of California, Irvine, to produce recommendations to schools.

They did not reject AI. Instead, they called on schools to resist the temptation to devote less time to writing — not because it will continue to be such a critical skill in the workplace, where it’s already waning, but to sharpen the mind.

Writing should be embedded across the curriculum, they advised. Students should continue to do the hard work of drafting their own sentences, paragraphs, and eventually full essays about their lives and about what they have read, both fiction and nonfiction. All this teaches grammar and vocabulary, certainly. But it also allows students to master the knowledge they are gaining.

There is room for AI, these experts suggested: The technology can help educators generate engaging writing prompts on whatever subjects they are teaching.

Teachers might also encourage students to use AI to get initial feedback on their writing before turning it in. Anna Mills, a writing instructor at the College of Marin in California, has developed detailed AI prompts that students can use to elicit useful feedback without outsourcing all the work.

Still, there is probably a need to limit access to the technology.

The University of Sydney has developed a policy known as the two-lane approach. Across every discipline, professors are required to give some assessments in person under secure conditions, limiting AI use. But they must also allow AI for other assessments, so students can show they know how to apply the technology.

Jessica Binney is dealing with AI as an English teacher at John Jay High School in the New York suburbs.

In a creative-writing class, she had students prompt a chatbot to write a poem. The results were predictably generic, so students then asked the chatbot to make revisions, considering where the bot performed well and where it fell short.

Still, like many educators, she had tired of policing AI misuse on take-home assignments. In her Advanced Placement English course, she moved much of the essay writing, produced inside the classroom, to pen and paper.

For the most part, students did not complain. Many had already been through an initial whirlwind romance with AI, before rethinking their relationship with the tools. Ainsley Graham, a junior, said she was thrilled by ChatGPT’s ability to help with data analysis in a science research class, but recognized the risks of using chatbots to write essays about literature.

“You’re not strengthening that muscle by actually analyzing these really hard texts,” she said. “They’re meant to be hard.”

When Cassady Tondorf, 17, learned how chatbots produced writing, she realized their utter lack of originality. “The entire internet is open to it,” she said. “It’s just regenerating the same things, over and over.”

If she wanted to be valuable on the job market, she felt, she would need to have ideas and skills that were uniquely her own.

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

Movement triggers a trail camera in a wildlife preserve in northern Sonora, Mexico, 2 miles south of the border with the United States. It captures two adult jaguars winding through oak thickets and tall grasses. The cats look relaxed, softly vocalizing to each other.

It’s remarkable to see any jaguars in these borderlands. But to observe two together is unheard of, said Ganesh Marín, a researcher with the environmental group Borderlands Restoration Network. Even more jaw-dropping is that one of the big cats looks to be a female. “When I saw it, I was excited,” Marín said of watching the video in 2023. “I thought, ‘This is fantastic.’”

No native female jaguars have been seen in the United States, or anywhere particularly close, for more than 70 years. So Marín waited for more evidence before he went public. He collected several more sightings of the cat, which he and his adviser named Adela. Then, this year, a camera-trap video surfaced that gave a clear view of another jaguar’s rear end, proving, according to Marín and other cat experts, that the individual in question is a female.

“It’s a game changer,” said Eamon Harrity, a researcher with Sky Island Alliance, a conservation science group.

Including Adela, five or six jaguars have been recorded at the wildlife preserve, Cuenca Los Ojos, since 2020, suggesting that the jaguar is closer than previously thought to reestablishing a population on the doorstep of the United States. “It totally deflates the narrative that female jaguars are over 100 miles to the south,” Harrity said. “They could be a day away from the U.S., or already here.” At the same time, the only known jaguar in the United States, a male named Cinco, has been roaming throughout southern Arizona. He has everything he needs — except a mate.

Geopolitics might get in the way of his acquiring one. Since 2025, contractors working for the Department of Homeland Security have finished 56 miles of new wall along the U.S.-Mexico border and 48 miles of secondary fencing. In Arizona, many areas of the border will soon have two 30-foot walls right next to each other. This barrier is poised to cut off three of the four most important remaining wildlife corridors between Mexico and Arizona, threatening the jaguar’s re-expansion despite all the positive recent signs. The wall, Harrity said, would make it “very unlikely the jaguars can come back on their own to the U.S. — at least for now.”

‘No campfire dies without talk of him’

Jaguars once roamed much of Sonora, western New Mexico, and Arizona, as far north as the Grand Canyon. The size of the population is unknown, but it was probably small and widely dispersed. Although they have long been revered in both countries — naturalist Aldo Leopold wrote in 1949 that the jaguar’s mythic nature so pervaded the borderlands that “no campfire dies without talk of him” — jaguars were also once regularly killed on sight, by government officials as well as hunters.

Since 1949, when a hunter killed a female jaguar near Arivaca in southern Arizona, no native female had been seen in the United States, or anywhere particularly close to the border in Mexico. The northernmost core breeding population was thought to be centered near the community of Sahuaripa, more than 100 miles south of the border, which includes a private protected area for the species called the Northern Jaguar Reserve.

A turning point came in early March 1996, when rancher Warner Glenn set off to hunt cougars in the Peloncillo Mountains, which start at the Mexican border and run north, straddling Arizona and New Mexico. His dogs caught the scent of a large cat and gave chase, and the feline finally stopped on a rocky outcropping. Peering up through pinyon pines, the rancher realized this was no mountain lion; it was a full-grown male jaguar.

Still, in 1997, with only a few such sightings of roaming males, the jaguar was listed as endangered. In 2014, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service designated more than 760,000 acres of critical habitat for the big cats, but after lawsuits from mining and ranching groups, that dropped to 640,000 acres.

Soon after Marín set up the camera network in 2020 for a doctoral project at the University of Arizona, he was elated to record a male jaguar he named Bonito, and a second male shortly after. Then came Adela and yet another male in 2023.

When Marín first saw the video of the two jaguars, he thought Adela was female because she has a smaller frame. Also, two males are unlikely to appear together and vocalize, he explained.

This year, he reinspected a video from April 2023 that showed a clear view of a jaguar’s rear end, and did a double take: No testicles were visible. And the spot pattern looked different from Adela’s, suggesting it could be a second female.

He sent the clip to Brett Dickson, a wild cat expert with Conservation Science Partners. “I was struck right away that I was likely looking at a female,” said Dickson, who forwarded the video to jaguar experts. (The video also shows the cat has skin folds that look like mammary glands. The possibility that this could be a lactating female “cannot be ruled out,” Dickson said.) Seven of the nine scientists agreed it was female; two are unsure.

While male jaguars can range hundreds of miles from their birthplace in search of new territory and mates, females generally do not travel as far from where they were born, and their mobility is a limiting factor in the species’ expansion. Seeing a female in Cuenca most likely means that she was born nearby, and that the breeding range of the jaguar extends farther north into the species’ historical territory than previously thought.

The ‘fabric of the jaguar’

To revisit the spot where Adela first showed up, Marín and Valerie Gordon, executive director of Cuenca Los Ojos, drove into the northernmost foothills of the Sierra Madre. A hike through grassy hills punctuated by oaks and mesquite took them to a spot where Marín lashed a camera around an alligator juniper back in 2020.

Less than 2 miles away — a brief stroll for a jaguar — they pointed out the short vehicle barrier on the U.S. border. This is one of the most important remaining unwalled wildlife corridors in the Southwest United States, Marín said.

A walk into the mountains took them to another camera that filmed Adela, showing her softly huffing as she passed. Marín gestured southward, where he envisions female jaguars making up a continuous thread that stretches vast distances through Mexico and far beyond. “The fabric of the jaguar is closer than we thought,” he said.

Under the first Trump administration, 30-foot fencing impervious to most large animals went up along more than 220 miles of the border in Arizona, curtailing north-to-south wildlife movement and depleting aquifers, since contractors use vast quantities of water for construction, said Myles Traphagen, a researcher with Cuenca. As codified in the Real ID Act of 2005, the homeland security secretary has the authority to waive nearly any law — including the Endangered Species Act — in building border walls.

John Mennell, a DHS spokesperson, said in a statement that the department planned to incorporate an unknown number of small wildlife passages, and referred further questions to the Fish and Wildlife Service, which declined to comment. These openings would be 8.5 inches by 11 inches, too small for jaguars.

Cameras on both sides of a 30-foot border wall in Cuenca Los Ojos have shown large wildlife pacing, trying to get through. Animals including bears, mountain lions, and jaguars have to move long distances to find water in arid areas, and border fencing makes this more difficult, Gordon said.

In the spring, Traphagen took a drive to check on the status of the wall, passing through the Baboquivari Mountains, a sacred place within the Tohono O’odham Nation. To the south, he saw contractors putting up 30-foot panels of new wall, one of about six places in Arizona where such work has begun, and miles of razor wire had been strung up.

“That corridor has been open since time immemorial,” said Kinley Ragan, a biologist with the Phoenix Zoo, who manages a network of cameras in the area. “We know this will have serious impacts on wildlife. It’s quite devastating.”

Several groups have worked to protect jaguars in Mexico, where the species is listed as endangered. For example, to change attitudes and make the animals more valuable alive than dead, the Northern Jaguar Reserve started a program in 2002 that compensates ranchers for trail camera photos of cats.

Since 2010, jaguar populations have increased throughout Mexico by about 30%, to a total of more than 5,300, according to a Mexican jaguar census released last year and led by Gerardo Ceballos, an ecologist and a senior researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

Among the main threats have been illegal hunting and retaliatory killings for perceived cattle predation, though research shows the cats much prefer native wildlife. Killings still happen, but the situation seems to have improved over the last two decades. Ceballos has argued for years that a female jaguar could return to the United States soon, if the two countries continue working together to protect habitat and connectivity.

While jaguars might not be welcomed back by every segment of society, they are rare and shy enough that they present no risk to humans. The return of an apex predator would be good for the area’s ecology, and an indicator that the environment is doing well, said Susan Malusa, director of the University of Arizona wild cat research center.

Females would enjoy the same legal protection as males, as endangered species, but ecologically and symbolically, the return of females would be a much bigger deal and would make jaguar conservation more urgent rather than theoretical.

Back at the spot where the first video was taken, Gordon mused about how vast this tract of wilderness is, and Marín noted how important it will be to keep this border free of 30-foot-tall walls while reestablishing wildlife corridors where possible.

“Jaguars are coming back,” Marín said, if we don’t get in their way. “I hope the U.S. is prepared for that — prepared to let that happen.”

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.