The Disappearing Writer: AI, Authorship, and the Fragile Future of Nursing Trust

Lisa Kelly, MSN, RN

Writer’s Camp Counselor

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A nurse’s view from both sides of the classroom.

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It started with a graduate-level group project. The kind where we were all balancing full-time jobs, late-night assignments, and the accelerated pace of a summer semester, when classes move twice as fast and all you want is to be doing anything but staring at rubrics and writing papers.

The team was a mix of familiar names and peers I was meeting for the first time. We divided up the work, trying to stay ahead of deadlines. One of my roles was presentation design, information transfer, and final editing. When the presentation came together, it looked clean and polished. But when I opened the reference list, something felt off.

I couldn’t find half the articles cited. The ones that did exist didn’t match the content. It didn’t take long to recognize what I was looking at: artificial intelligence (AI)-generated citations. Fabricated, misplaced, or misrepresented. I knew what to look for. I had been fortunate enough to learn about AI early on from one of my professors, and wise enough to not discard the lessons.

I reached out to my peer who had compiled the citations. I didn’t accuse. I offered help. I acknowledged the pressure, the time crunch, the struggle. I gently pointed out what I’d found and said I’d be happy to walk through sourcing with them. The reply was short. “I’ll take a look.”

To their credit, they did. The references were updated, and citations corrected. We didn’t submit the flawed version which felt like a win. However, the silence that stuck around was a loss I didn’t see coming. Not once did my peer acknowledge the error or that anything had gone wrong in the first place. I was frustrated but mostly sad. It was the first time I felt something in nursing education quietly fall apart.

That moment stayed with me, not because of the mistake, but because of the stillness around it. It showed me that not only do we have the potential to use AI irresponsibly, but we also might be afraid to admit when we’re wrong. When we can’t admit that we stop growing. We stop learning. We protect our egos at the expense of our integrity.

The Slow Unraveling

Nursing is the most trusted profession in the country.¹ But what happens when the trust begins to erode from the inside? Not in dramatic scandals or front-page stories but in the slow crumbling of our learning spaces? We are quietly breaking our profession down, and we don’t even realize it.

I’ve started noticing it as an educator as well. Students submit perfect essays that don’t sound like them. Reflections that read like glossed-over literature reviews. Class discussions that trail off because the student can’t explain what they wrote. As an educator, it’s disheartening. As a student, it’s destabilizing.

It isn’t just our students. A nursing learner in another graduate program recently shared an experience where she had submitted a paper and received feedback that was unmistakably AI-generated, hollow, vague, and impersonal. Her reaction was telling: “If I wanted AI to tell me how I did, I would’ve asked it myself.” This highlights a potentially overlooked fracture: when educators begin outsourcing feedback, students stop feeling seen. Without that connection, trust dissolves.

We often say nursing is both an art and a science. But writing is where they meet. It’s where we reflect and wrestle with what we believe. When we let AI do that work for us, we’re not saving time; we’re outsourcing our thinking. Even worse, we’re diluting the voice of nursing itself.

What begins in a group project doesn’t stay there. It bleeds into our scholarship. Into the articles being submitted to journals. Into conference abstracts, dissertations, and capstone projects. I’ve read manuscripts where the citations unravel under scrutiny, where the argument lacks depth, where something feels empty. And the worst part? It’s happening faster than we can teach against it.

Outsourcing our Thinking

This is not just about scholarly dishonesty but a growing disconnection from our intellectual processes. AI, by design, cannot be accountable. It cannot disclose conflicts of interest, reflect on ethical tensions, or take responsibility for the consequences of what it produces.²

Layered into this is a deeper concern rooted in bias. AI systems are trained on data that reflects historical and societal inequities. That bias doesn’t vanish when it generates an academic paragraph; it gets replicated, dressed in clean grammar and fluent prose. Research has shown that large language models can reinforce racial, gender, and cultural biases in subtle but measurable ways.³ When students unknowingly rely on this output, they may be importing those same distortions into nursing scholarship, where accuracy and equity matter most.

AI isn’t the problem, but our relationship to it might be. We’ve created a culture where speed is rewarded more than thought, where correctness is more important than reflection, where the pressure to perform outweighs the space to grow.

The danger here is that when students learn to write without thinking, they graduate into nurses who are unsure of their voices. When nurse scholars publish work built on shaky foundations, the integrity of the discipline suffers. When trust erodes at every level, from classroom to conference, it becomes harder to know what is real.

I often wonder if we’re having the wrong conversation. We ask: Should we ban AI? Should we police it? But maybe the better question is: How do we rebuild trust? How do we create environments where students feel safe enough to learn the hard way, instead of faking the easy way? Where mistakes are part of the process, not something to be masked by machines?

We need to stop waiting for perfect policies and start modeling transparency. As educators. As students. As writers. We need to slow down. Create space for drafts. For voice. For vulnerability. We need to reward learning, not just outcomes.

We need to reclaim the narrative. Writing isn’t just an assignment. It’s an act of professional identity. It’s how we make sense of suffering, how we share knowledge, how we heal. If we lose the writer, we lose the nurse.

Reclaiming the Writer

So, what do we do?

If you’re a student: Write badly. Then write better. Ask for help. Use AI, but use it to think, not to hide. Let it be a conversation partner, not a ghostwriter.

If you’re an educator: Talk about AI. Not in fear, but in truth. Ask students how they’re using it; be curious, not just critical. Teach them what is acceptable and ethical and what is not; help your students to understand the difference. Give guidance. Share with students how you use AI to support curriculum development.⁴ Allow space for unpolished thoughts.

When writing feedback, make it real. Make it human. Use your voice, not a generated one, because students can tell. The moment you show them that their effort is not worth their time, they stop trusting you.

But also learn and be open to the updates that come with AI, because tools like calibrated generative AI feedback are being tested with encouraging results toward being well received and enhancing student learning.⁵

If you’re a nurse writer: Be bold. Be accountable. Share how hard it is. How long it takes to find the right words. How many times you revise. Show that writing is messy and worth it. Use AI in the very best ways, those ChatGPT-generated article title suggestions put even my most creative efforts to shame, every time.

And for all of us, remember that the trust we hold as a profession starts in small places. In group projects. In late-night edits. In citations that are real. In work that is ours. We rebuild trust by choosing honesty even when it’s easier not to.

The truth is things aren’t quietly falling apart anymore. They’re falling apart loudly. The only way forward is to name it, face it, and write our way through it.

References

1. American Nurses Association Celebrates The Power of Nurses: Nurses Take the #1 Spot on Gallup’s Annual Poll for 23 Years Straight. ANA. Published January 13, 2025. Accessed October 19, 2025. https://www.nursingworld.org/news/news-releases/2025/american-nurses-association-celebrates-the-power-of-nurses-nurses-take-the-1-spot-on-gallups-annual-poll-for-23-years-straight/
2. Oermann MH. Using AI to write scholarly articles in nursing. Nurse Educator. 2024;49(1):52. doi:10.1097/NNE.0000000000001577
3. Bender EM, Gebru T, McMillan-Major A, Shmitchell S. On the dangers of stochastic parrots: Can language models be too big? In: Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency. ACM; 2021. doi:10.1145/3442188.3445922
4. Phillips B. Embracing a thoughtful integration of artificial intelligence into nursing education. Computers, Informatics, Nursing: CIN. Published online April 18, 2025:10.1097/CIN.0000000000001315. doi:10.1097/CIN.0000000000001315
5. Gabriela C. Z, Akash S, Anastasia-Olga (Olnancy) T, William C, Mary K. The Role of AI Feedback in University Students’ Learning Experiences : An Exploration Grounded in Activity Theory. Accessed October 19, 2025. https://cgscholar.com/bookstore/works/the-role-of-ai-feedback-in-university-students-learning-experiences

Author: Lisa Kelly

Reviewed and Edited by: Leslie H. Nicoll

Copyright © 2025 Writer’s Camp and Lisa Kelly

Citation: Kelly L. The Disappearing Writer: AI, Authorship, and the Fragile Future of Nursing Trust. The Writer’s Camp Journal, 2025; 1(3):7. doi: 10.5281/zenodo.17391724