The bridge AI-writing builds

From 'Why not normalise use of AI in writing?', by Amit Kumar, assistant professor in the Institute for Development and Communication, Chandigarh, in The Hindu, August 29, 2026:

Whose authority is being protected by that resistance and challenged, if AI writing gets the green signal? With a good research idea and access to advanced AI tools, someone who has never set foot on remotest sites such as Antarctica or the Everest can now produce research that rivals the work of those who spent years in the field. Someone who never became bilingual can now write fluently across languages. Someone who always felt short to sharpen their own prose can now have it handed to them, polished, on a plate. Whose authority does that threaten?

The authority of the person who can afford to go to Antarctica and has the opportunity and means to do so is being challenged. Or so the author seems to imply. But it makes no sense to stop there. The person whose authority is really being challenged is the one failing to ease access to Antarctica and allows the inequitable gates of affordability, means, and opportunity to still stand.

That is, fight for everyone to be able to write well rather than vouchsafing that particular skill to a few while arguing it should be okay for others to use AI to leapfrog over them — and of course while learning little in that process, including knowledge that will make them better thinkers rather than just being better writers. If you do not dismantle the structural barriers, you cannot pretend to be doing more than using AI to redistribute access to their benefits — and certainly not dismantling the inequities that attach a premium to those benefits in the first place.

And it so happens that the E.H. Carr quote the author invokes at the end of the piece can be applied in favour of my position as well.