The following column was written by Russell Frank… honest

During a strategy session about our fall classes – yes, the 2026-27 academic year is nearly upon us – one of my colleagues confessed to using AI to generate the feedback he gives students on their writing assignments. 

I was aghast. He explained: You don’t just turn the grading over to AI. You train it, just as you would an inexperienced graduate student. 

Specifically: You give AI examples of the feedback you’ve given on past assignments. Then you give it some ungraded assignments to practice on. And then you start tweaking. You keep prompting it to say this instead of that until it generates prose that sounds like something you would write. 

Frankly, training AI to give good feedback sounded like more work than composing the feedback oneself. Still, I was intrigued – but not about getting AI to relieve me of some of the grunt work of teaching. I was curious to see if I could get AI to do what I’m doing now: write a column that sounds like a column I would write.

We were in the midst of some oppressive weather, so I prompted thus: “Write a Russell Frank column on the dog days of summer.”

Here is the start of what appeared on my screen:

The air is thick enough to chew, the lawn has turned the color of a cardboard box, and the dog is flat on her side on the kitchen linoleum, looking less like a pet and more like a discarded rug.

Welcome to the dog days of summer.

We use the phrase now to describe that oppressive, mid-August stretch when the humidity wraps around you like a wet wool blanket and ambition goes to die.  

One immediate problem: I don’t have a dog and haven’t had a dog since Bop the Movie Dog scavenged frat house lawns for discarded bagels and pizza slices. That was 20 years ago. Keep up, AI!

I also wouldn’t write “Welcome to” anything, having long ago consigned that device to the scrap heap of journalistic cliches. And comparing the feel of humid air to a “wet wool blanket” seemed as stale as the atmospheric conditions thus described.

Overall, though, I was impressed. There was a nice little discussion of why we call these the dog days: At this time of year, the Romans believed, Sirius, the brightly burning Dog Star, “added its own heat to the sun’s, creating a double whammy of scorching weather.” 

I also liked a line about “cicadas cranking up their buzzsaw chorus.” 

But what impressed me most, I confess, is that the phrase “Russell Frank column” means something in cyberspace. I felt “seen,” in contemporary parlance, though I shouldn’t be surprised that, having written most of my columns in the digital age, I have left a digital footprint.

Eager to learn, AI offered to edit in some State College references; to make it funnier; and to work with a word limit. Sounded good to me: Yes to the local references, yes, yes, yes to funnier and pare it down to 800 words, please (I didn’t say please). 

Version 2 began, “The air in Happy Valley is currently thick enough to chew…” Then came name-checks of Allen Street, College Avenue, Mount Nittany, the Creamery, Phyrst, Atherton Street, Blue Course Drive, Trader Joe’s, Wegman’s, Holmes-Foster Park, Slab Cabin Run, Sunset Park, Beaver Stadium and the departure of 40,000 college students, “leaving the town feeling like a beautifully abandoned movie set.”

At the end, my ghostwriter asked me if it should also work in Arts Fest or Grange Fair. Au contraire, I replied. Dial back those local references. Way back.

And lose the clutter. I gave examples of unnecessary words: currently, directly, slightly, casually, utterly, entirely, completely. (Like Stephen King, I believe “the road to hell is paved with adverbs.”)

Accordingly, Version 3 was decidedly (uh-oh, adverb) crisper. And speaking of dogs, AI is like a dog that will play fetch as long as you remain willing to throw the stick. Even fewer words? Shorter paragraphs? 

Who’s a good boy?

At that point I didn’t know what else to tell it beyond a vague “make it more interesting.” And it probably would have, somehow. But I had thrown my last stick. 

Let’s say, though, that I succeeded at getting AI to write a column that I was happy with. Would I publish it? Absolutely not.

That sounds like an ethical stance, and ethics does enter into it, but it’s not the main reason.

I won’t hand off the writing of my column to AI for the same reason I wouldn’t hand over a hot fudge sundae to someone to eat for me: I enjoy it too much. 

As I hope you can tell. I wrote my first newspaper column in the 1990s. By now I’ve probably written close to 1,000 of these babies. I hope to write 100 more. 

I may be replaceable, but they’re going to have to pry the keyboard from my cold, dead hands. 

Grrr.