AI on AI

 Just for the record, I did my own research and found that for all practical purposes neither NSDA nor NCFL meaningfully ban AI. NSDA allows it during debate prep time! If I haven’t pointed out the problem with that to your satisfaction by now, it’s never going to happen. 

 

Out of curiosity, I asked good old Google Gemini to tell me the pros and cons of AI in high school debate. It summarized it thus: Using AI in high school debate offers powerful research acceleration and practice capabilities, but it risks eroding core analytical skills, increasing academic dishonesty, and worsening competitive resource gaps. 

 

No kidding. 

 

Here’s the rest of it:

 

A discussion on how debate competitors weigh the real-world advantages and pitfalls of generative tools:

 

Arguments For AI in High School Debating

• Research Efficiency: AI helps students rapidly parse dense texts, summarize long articles, and brainstorm alternative angles or counter-arguments during prep time. 

 

Well, that’s my original argument against it, that instead of using your prep time to prep, you can have AI prep for you. I do agree that it can be useful it that parsing and summarizing, but I’m on the fence with the brainstorming, at least insofar as it harms real-life human brainstorming. 

 

• Accessibility and Practice: Under-resourced debate teams can use AI as a sparring partner to simulate opposing viewpoints and practice rebuttal delivery when human coaches or teammates are unavailable.  

 

I hadn’t thought of that. It’s a real benefit.

 

• Real-World Readiness: Proponents argue that debate must reflect the modern technological landscape; learning to leverage and audit AI safely prepares students for future academic and professional environments.

 

That’s the one that may be true and at the same time may be the most specious, that we’re preparing students for a world full of AI. The question is, How should the world be full of AI?

 

Arguments Against AI in High School Debating

• Erosion of Critical Thinking: Relying on AI to structure arguments or write blocks bypasses the deep analytical struggle required to genuinely understand a topic. 

 

Part of my main thesis, of course. 

 

• Fabricated Evidence and Hallucinations: Generative tools frequently invent fake citations, misattribute data, and produce false facts, which undermines competitive integrity and rigorous source verification.  

 

I haven’t talked about this, the possibility of bad sources, which I am told is a big problem when teams do AI research. Frankly I think this is easily solved: in a word, verify!

 

• Inequity and Pay-to-Win Dynamics: Access to advanced, premium AI toolkits can widen the competitive gap between wealthy school programs and underfunded public school teams.  

 

I pointed out that the folks out there that provide case materials for a fee are among those with a lot to lose with AI. On the other hand, this is where we get away from the basic Q&D Gemini approach and into specifically designed AI materials for a fee. They’re probably already out there; if not, before long you will indeed see Chat1AR at an app sale near you. I’ve only scratched the surface of AI’s potential [mis]uses in high school forensics. 

 

Would you like help drafting a specific pro-AI or con-AI case brief for a resolution, or do you need tournament rules regarding ethical AI disclosure?

 

You know, the last place I would look for the ethics of AI is AI itself.

 

 

Which is about all I’m going to say on the subject. If you’re reading this, you obviously have an interest in the subject. As an educator, how will you use AI so that your students can benefit from it? How do you avoid the pitfalls? Tough questions with no easy answers. But you need to not merely be thinking about this but prioritizing your thinking about it. Given that every Google search can kick off with a Gemini AI response, students already in the middle of it. AI’s ability to undermine education is clear as day. Its ability to render high school debate a meaningless exercise is also pretty clear. 

Choose wisely, my friend. 

AI and debate research

 It occurs to me that the people who should really be marching the streets in protest against the use of AI in debate are the people who run businesses selling debate support materials. The most elementary AI does it fast and free; I mostly use Google’s not necessarily sterling Gemini for quick and dirty results, and as often as not those results, while quick, aren't all that dirty. The fact that Gemini is simply There probably makes it the AI of choice for the teeming masses. I use Claude for more complicated stuff, but to be honest, I don’t use AI for much of anything except travel guidance. Why would I? I mean, I certainly don't use it for my writing and there’s not much call for it on the golf course…

Back in my coaching days, the first step whenever a new topic was released was a brainstorming session. We would write it on the blackboard and try to read the collective mind of the framers and figure out why this topic, especially if it wasn’t all that clear on face. (There were some real stinker LD topics back in the day; what you get now is prime grade A by comparison.) And then we would just bat around the subject itself. What did we know about it? What did we need to find out? We decidedly did not talk about arguments or cases. That was for later, after we knew all we possibly could about the topic itself. Good arguments come from deep understanding of the subject, not from the top of your head the minute a resolution is released. After our brainstorming we’d go off and research, and the next time we’d meet, we’d start examining potential arguments in the light of our research. Keep in mind that we did all of this as a team: whatever was discussed was discussed in an open arena. If not exactly the marketplace of ideas it was, at least, the corner QuikMart of ideas.

Ultimately, I feel, our approach was a good one. Everyone learned a lot, which was the whole point of the thing after all. Coincidentally, we had decent success at tournaments, which was not the whole point of the thing, at least for me, but not a bad side result nevertheless.

Goodbye to all that.

I gave my handy dandy Google Gemini this: Give me 10 tags for both aff and neg for contentions for the Sept-Oct 2026 NSDA LD topic. I could not even remember the topic when I made the query; that’s how prepared I was.

Ten seconds later I got back what I’ve copied and pasted verbatim below. I’ll just point out a couple of things before you read it. First of all, it gave me exactly what I asked for. Second, it eliminates any need on my part to think of reasons for either an aff or neg; that work is all done for me. (It’s now done for you, too, if you were looking for some Sept-Oct arguments.) Third, it’s not bad. It’s not that I particularly like or dislike any of the arguments, but as likely as not, these are the arguments that will be in play, short of really nutty off-case stuff. Fourth, there’s that tag at the end: If you want to build full cases out of these, let me know if you would like me to pair any of these tags with specific philosophical frameworks (like Kantianism, Utilitarianism, or Cap K) or help write the link and impact chains for a specific side. Whoa Nellie!!! Take 3 tags from column A, pick one framework from column B, choose six side dish impacts from column C. All the educational benefits of research and freeform public discussion in the classroom completely eliminated and then some. Hello, 2026. 

In another post I discussed how AI-written cases eliminate the competitive and educational benefits to be derived from writing them yourself. In yet another post I suggested that AI is the search method du jour, and educators needed to figure out what that means. What you see below is the thing that needs to be figured out, because I don’t know if it’s a good thing or a bad thing. What I do know is that it is THE thing. This is not your computer searching for articles/quotes/facts on a subject. This is your computer, first and foremost, telling you what the subject is. That is beyond what we used to think of as research. Remember, I got this without even remembering offhand what the topic actually was. 

There’s a lot to chew on in this. 

 

 

 

The September-October 2026 Lincoln-Douglas debate topic selected by the National Speech & Debate Association is: "Resolved: Outer space colonization is a moral imperative."

 

Affirmative (Pro) Contentions & Argument Tags

• Extinction Insurance: Colonization prevents permanent human annihilation from global catastrophes.
• Existential Hedge: Spreading human consciousness secures long-term survival against planetary risks.
• Scientific Renaissance: Off-world laboratories accelerate breakthrough technologies and medical cures.
• Resource Abundance: Asteroid mining solves terrestrial scarcity and climate exhaustion.
• Cosmic Duty: Humanity possesses a unique obligation to seed the universe with moral agency.
• Economic Expansion: New interplanetary markets drive infinite post-scarcity growth.
• Inspiration Driver: Space futures re-engage youth in science, unity, and grand ambition.
• Demographic Survival: Overpopulation relief eases structural strain on Earth's ecosystems.
• Post-National Harmony: Space governance fosters cooperative cosmopolitanism free from old borders.
• Value-to-Life Metric: Expanding sentient life infinitely maximizes total universal goodness.
•  

Negative (Con) Contentions & Argument Tags

• Earth Neglect: Space spending diverts vital capital away from immediate terrestrial suffering.
• Imperialist Spillover: Off-world expansion reproduces colonial violence, exploitation, and inequality.
• Ecological Imperialism: Extraterrestrial mining despoils pristine pristine celestial environments.
• Corporate Dominance: Unregulated space enterprise empowers unaccountable monopoly power.
• Safety Distraction: Colonization is a high-risk gamble that fails to protect vulnerable populations on Earth.
• Lock-in Risk: Spreading flawed human institutions locks systemic injustices into the cosmos.
• Resource Sink: Astronomical financial costs drain resources better used for climate crisis mitigation.
• Techno-Solutionism: The myth of escape de-chains society from fixing environmental collapse at home.
• Exploited Labor: Space industries rely on dangerous, highly stratified labor conditions for workers.
• Biosecurity Hazard: Interplanetary transport risks introducing catastrophic space pathogens to Earth.

 

If you want to build full cases out of these, let me know if you would like me to pair any of these tags with specific philosophical frameworks (like Kantianism, Utilitarianism, or Cap K) or help write the link and impact chains for a specific side.

 

AI and Case Writing

 I do seem to have AI on the brain lately. 

The more I think about it, if I were still coaching the less likely I would be to allow students to use AI for the writing of cases. It’s not that the AI of it is somehow ethically wrong; I mean, as far back as I can recall students have been buying pre-written cases from various purveyors. It’s the “not writing” of cases per se that bothers me, regardless of the source. Here’s why.

The act of writing something requires you to think about that something. If it’s a debate case, first you have to study the subject, then think about it, then come up with a main theme you wish to argue—that such-and-such is good/bad for this essential reason—and then you have to come up with contentions that expound on that main theme. This requires a lot of thinking on the part of the writer. Asking AI to write a case for you eliminates the need for most of that thinking. The problem here is that the lack of that thinking is the skipping of a lot of steps in your preparation for rounds. That original thinking on your part has massaged your brain with all sorts of information and thoughts and byways. When the round happens, that massaging makes you ready for just about anything, not just what you wrote but what you considered and what you didn’t write. You are as prepared as conceivably possible. Delivering a pre-written case eliminates that preparation. It also eliminates all the learning derived from that preparation. The educational value of case-writing no longer exists.

There is another advantage to writing your own case. One of the most important educational values of forensics is mastering public speaking. The speed of LD and CX undermines this to some extent but in PF, with its predominance of lay judges, effective speaking is very important. When you write something and then present it orally, it sounds like you because it is you. Your familiarity with the language used, the emphases, the general style, is implicit. Public speaking is a difficult and often frightening situation; comfort with the material being presented removes much of inherent difficulty. Being an effective speaker can definitely be a life skill learnt through our activity. Removing the prep from the speaking equation is another more indirect lessening of debate’s educational value.

Meanwhile, even if you do get an AI-written case, there is the question of its reliability. You got AI to write it for you presumably as a labor-saving action. Are you going to parse it all the way to hell in back—as you should—to ensure that its citations, if any, are accurate? Are you going to use it as an outline and write your own case based on it? Are you going to practice it to death until in fact it does sound like you wrote it? All of these would seem to eliminate the efficiencies you were seeking in the first place by not writing the case yourself, while at the same time still eliding the educational benefits that writing it yourself would have granted.

Nevertheless, the NSDA and NCFL are perfectly happy with you using AI to write your cases. It is, in a word, no skin off their noses if you skip the educational basics. After all, most of the activities they support are IEs and Congress, and the numbers behind those activities are far greater than the number of debaters. And AI is a messy subject at best, so why not avoid it if you can, despite the fact that the Sept-Oct PF topic goes at it at the roots? I wonder how many educators across the country are really well-informed on the subject. 

There is one legitimate albeit depressing argument in favor of using AI to write cases. The world students will be venturing into in the coming years will indeed be a world of AI. AI will do most of the writing of a non-creative (and, God forbid, even creative) nature. Reports, memos, brochures, proposals, etc.: most people are already not particularly good at writing but presumably good at their jobs, so when their jobs require writing, why wouldn’t they use a shortcut? It could be said that learning mastery of AI in secondary education will be of value in the long run. But this is not mastery of AI, it is simply learning one application of AI, and not a particularly desirable one at that, for all the reasons stated above. I would like to live in a world where everyone is capable of writing workable prose for memos and reports and the like. I would like to live in a world that educates everyone to do that writing. This is not me being a luddite, any more than if I wanted all art to be created by humans as expressions of humanity. Casual writing is, to some extent, an expression of personality. Do we want to lose that by making all casual writing machine-generated? 

I would hope that the NSDA and NCFL, and educators in general, are hotly debating the use of AI. Actually, I know that a lot of folks are. But if the forces against AI in education lose the battle, it is education’s loss, and ultimately humanity’s loss. There really isn’t much to debate about that. 

Sept-Oct in Debateland

• These are the September-October resolutions. You probably know them already if you’re in the game.

  
  

  • Public Forum: Resolved: The United States federal government should enact a moratorium on hyperscale data center construction.
  • Lincoln-Douglas: Resolved: Outer space colonization is a moral imperative.

  
  

  The contrast is interesting. I can’t check out the news these days without seeing articles about the building of data centers. These things are enormous and extremely controversial. As our tech gods dive ever deeper into AI, well- or ill-advisedly, more processing power is needed. We may think we’re in a world of ever increasing miniaturization, given the power of our personal devices, but the data those devices need, and will most likely grow to need more of, require monster, or as NSDA would have it, hyperscale, data centers. 

  
  

  This is a wonderfully hot topic. On one side, our executive branch wants to go so far as to give over federal park land to the operation. And of course on that same side is (so-called) tech progress, US competitiveness, etc., etc. On the other side, my use of the word monster to describe these things is only mildly hyperbolic. And on that side is the demonization of AI and its apostles, the protection of the environment, etc., etc. So many irons in the fire... I would imagine that, during the months of debate, nary a day will go by without a new item in the news, and new discussion thereby from all sorts of people on every side of the issue. A PF team will have plenty to work with, and the strongest PF teams will work with all of it. In other words, a strong topic, with enormous relevancy in our present-day life, with an almost daily impact. Kudos to those who came up with it, and those who voted for it.

  
  

  Meanwhile, I can’t check out the news these days and ever see articles about the colonization of outer space. As we’re driving along in our golf cart between holes the subject has yet to arise in the forty years we’ve been banging away at those little white balls. My poker game has yet to wonder about the morality of space colonization in between hands. In dinner conversations, with friends or family, nary a peep. 

  
  

  My guess is that someone was deep-thinking about Elon Musk and Mars and decided that this was the underlying question that needed to be pondered. Or maybe that particular someone has spent just a little too much time with their Paramount subscription following all the various Star Trek series. I'm wildly guessing what they really want to do is discuss spending money on space versus spending money for some sort of social change on earth. I mean, that’s what it boils down to, if you argue it on a straightforward level,  keeping in mind that what we're talking about here is morality. Clash? Good luck with that. I mean, the Rez doesn’t suggest that it’s space for the sake of knowledge; it’s talking specifically about the morality of colonization. So, fasten your seatbelts, judges, because sooner or later you’re going to be hearing about the negative aspects of colonialism. Man versus the Martians? Whatever. It won’t be any fun, whatever it is.

  
  

  I guess that the LDers will quickly enough find a way to debate the topic; they always do. And with any luck, it will be somewhat reasonable. But meaningful? There is no world in which if we don't invest in space exploration we will instead invest in feeding the needy. Any novice policy debater worth their salt can explain that one to you. If colonialism discussion was the goal, has anyone noticed, for example, our President’s actions in Venezuela or Greenland? Plus colonial abuse of indigents does require indigents, and so far the Alpha Centaurions have been keeping a fairly low profile. So they probably really do want to argue resource allocation. Or maybe I’m missing the point entirely. It wouldn’t be the first time. By the way, the alternative to this in the voting was a resolution that "keeping wild animals in zoos is immoral." I can't say that I like it—that word "immoral" applied to animals is a philosophical landmine, not to mention the great work that major zoos around the world to to protect and revitalize endangered species, among other good works—but at least it is fairly relevant: Free the elephants and all that. Versus a rather unlikely "moral imperative." Immanuel Kant is rolling in his grave.

  
  

  Sigh.

  
  

  Of course, I won’t have anything to do with any of it, thank God. I’ll be in the tab room. Or on the golf course. Or at the poker table. Or enjoying a nice dinner. Discussing everything but the morality of colonizing Tatooine.