I was talking to a friend the other day when the topic of AI came up.
AI, he said, is going to change the way the education system functions. It’s about to render most teachers obsolete. Have a question about history? Ask ChatGPT; it can answer any question you can come up with. Want to write an essay? There’s no need to learn how to convey your point in text; just ask ChatGPT to do it, and it’ll crank out an A+ worthy piece of writing.
Science, math, English, it doesn’t matter; what chance does a burned-out underpaid teacher have against the sum total of human knowledge, all just a button press away?
My friend didn’t say this future scenario was good or bad, simply inevitable. He might be right. AI programs like ChatGPT are evolving before our eyes at an incredible rate. Just a couple of years ago, generative AI was little more than a novelty. Now, for many people, it’s become an ever-present assistant at work and at play, a modern-day oracle that answers your questions and does your work without ever asking for a lunch break.
I’ve written several columns about my personal distaste for AI. I’ve focused on how it’s a cheap crutch, a way to generate “art” and “literature” by stealing from those who have already done the hard work.
Having said that, I do see value in AI. If your boss asks you to write ten bullet points highlighting the profit margins from the last quarter, feel free to ask ChatGPT to do it instead. AI should be used to do the work that kills the human soul, not the work that celebrates it.
But I’ve come to realize that my biggest issue with AI isn’t just that it steals from existing work (though it does), nor is it that AI is an unearned shortcut (though it is).
My real issue is something that’s a bit harder to express.
When my friend made his incredibly depressing prediction, it made me think back on my educational experience. Since I graduated from high school, there has been a greater and greater emphasis placed on standardized testing, thanks largely to the disastrous No Child Left Behind Act. Teachers have been strong-armed into helping their students pass a test rather than actually learn.
The fact is, no one remembers what they were taught during their primary education. When enough time has passed, no one remembers exactly what they were taught in college. There are tidbits here and there — for example, I know mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell — but all the specifics I could once recite by heart are a blur.
The mark of a good educator is that they don’t just teach you how to memorize facts; they teach you how to think.
I often reflect on a couple of creative writing classes I took in college with Dr. Paul Hanstedt. Those were some of the best classes of my educational career, and they were also by far the most difficult. There were days I cursed Dr. Hanstedt’s name, and the fiction I produced during that class wasn’t fit for the back pages of Swank, much less The New Yorker.
But the point of that class, I realized later, wasn’t to help me produce a handful of decent short stories. It was to teach me discipline. It was to teach me how to push through and write even when I didn’t feel like it. It was to teach me to look at what I had written and ask myself if it was up to my standards, and to make sure those standards are high.
ChatGPT can do a lot of things, but it can’t replicate the experience of a towering Midwestern man telling you that your final grade depends on the seventh draft of a short story that lost the thread four drafts ago.
Those classes are a big part of the reason that I’ve missed only one deadline in nearly ten years of writing this column. They’re the reason I’ve participated in and completed the International 3 Day Novel Writing Contest for 18 years in a row.
So yes, AI is still a cheap shortcut, and it still steals from actual creators, and it will never say anything that hasn’t already been said because it can only copy and remix, not innovate.
But the most pernicious aspect of AI is that it will never teach you how to think; instead, it will just do the thinking for you and then pat you on the back for being smart.
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