In researching opting out of allowing WordPress.com and Tumblr.com using my content to sell to Midjourney and OpenAI, I ran across some thoughtful writing on opting out of AI by Justin Dametz.
This is someone I likely wouldn’t cross paths with, since I’m not someone who is very interested in theology, which he writes quite a bit about. I imagine he could say the same about my writing, but we have a nexus.
His piece was written last year, and it echoes some of my own sentiments about the balance between AI and writing, where he makes solid points about young people learning how to communicate themselves.
I tend to agree.
Yet, I am also reminded of learning calculus without a calculator. Scientific calculators were fairly new in the late 1980s when I learned calculus, and they even came solar powered so we wouldn’t have to fiddle with the batteries. These were powerful tools, but my class wasn’t allowed to use them until we had the fundamentals down. This, of course, did not stop us.
Speaking for myself, I wrote code in BASIC on an old Vic-20 that allowed me to check my answers. This didn’t help me with my homework, really, or doing tests, since we were required to show our working and if we got the wrong answer and did it the right way, we still got the majority of the points for the question. We had to demonstrate the fundamentals.
How does one demonstrate the fundamentals of writing? How does one demonstrate the ability to communicate without crutches? The answer is by assuring none of the crutches are available to help. I suppose we could have writing done in Faraday cages in classes to evaluate what students write – or we could simply reward original writing because the one thing that artificial intelligence cannot do is imagine, and while it can relate human experience through the distillation of statistics and words, it doesn’t itself understand the human experience.
Generative AIs can spit out facts, narratives that it’s seen before, and images based on what it has been trained on – but it really adds nothing new to the human experience except the ability to connect things across what human knowledge we have trained it on.
But how do we teach children how to write without it? How do we then teach students how to learn and be critical of the results we get?
First, we have to teach them learn instead of chasing grades, a problem which has confounded us for decades, to have ability rather than titles and fancy pieces of paper to hang on the walls.
That’s the next challenge.
Thank you for linking to my piece! I found your thoughts here very interesting, and you raise some good questions at the end here, ones I grappled with during my time in the classroom. One tack I took was to try to impress upon them the importance of critical thinking, and of the craft of writing as an artform. Of course, they were middle schoolers, so for many of them, this didn’t stick. The goal was to get through the day, get a grade that wouldn’t make mom and dad mad, and get in front of a screen as quickly as possible. If AI made that happen, they’d take it. I did experiment with creative ways to incorporate AI into their learning in ways that made sense (generating questions, pointing the direction in research, organizing thoughts) but the temptation to just let it write was obviously there. It’s quite a sticky situation we’ve gotten ourselves into, and I’m not sure what the way forward is going to be.
Sorry for the late comment approval! I really appreciated your post because you have first person knowledge. I taught for a short period, but not long enough to claim your experience.
Yes, I don’t know the way forward and won’t pretend to. I have some further concerns because AI is now being trained on video and audio. I’ll be writing about that soon enough. The premise so far is that with AI being trained to statistically mimic our communications, and with our use of it in marketing and other things, it leads us to ‘sticky stuff’ that can be completely computer generated by those who do not have the skillset to do it themselves… What I’m wrapping my head around is how that will cause changes. I’m hard pressed to think of that as progress.