AI is a hot topic, of course. Very hot, judging by the amount of water fed into the data processing centers. Most of the discussion I’ve run into revolves around the future: Will AI take away jobs? Will it help or hurt the environment, the economy, international relations? Will it become SkyNet? Will Arnold Schwarzenegger be back? All interesting questions in one way or another, often involving greater or lesser degrees of trepidation. But I think the AI phenomenon has already done (past tense) something that is definitely good: the existence of AI has called our bluff.
In educational settings, use of AI allows all students to check most boxes without doing any work. One of our recent graduates told me that at the big university he attends, students use AI for all their assignments. They aren’t doing the work, but they are getting the credit. Which raises the question: What does “credit” mean in this context, and what, really is the point of assignments? (That’s not a so-called rhetorical question. It’s a question we need to answer honestly.) Credit in an academic context, especially up through high school, means grades: numbers and letters intended to approximately represent the quality and progress of a student’s work. That could be good if a) such representation actually happened and b) it were even possible.
But the intended representation of quality doesn’t happen, because grades have become such a necessity in their own right that quality and growth have become secondary. And approximating a student’s mastery with a number isn’t entirely possible to begin with. It gives what is partly subjective the illusion of complete objectivity, by assuming that all students are to do the same thing in the same way with the same ideal results. This cannot be relied on, especially if you believe that every person is called to a unique path and vocation. Moreover, for some subjects (notably the humanities) the grade system uses quantifiers (numbers and letters) to represent some things that are not quantifiable. As I say to my students, “What number is the word ‘alligator’? What percentage is Les Misérables?” There is no answer to these questions because they have no meaning. These things aren’t quantities, and representing them with quantifiers is misleading at best. Yet we continue to try to quantify things that aren’t quantities, so that we can approximate a student’s progress, rank him relative to his peers, and represent his accomplishments to the rest of the world. Even if this is a worthy goal and the system is as good as we can make it, the consequent grade inflation and grade obsession are omnipresent, and render the attempt impotent. Grades have turned into a bluff, pretending one thing is important when in our hearts we know another thing is the real deal. Teachers are teachers because they love teaching, their subjects, and their students, not because they are grading superfans.
Too many students think that school really is just about getting those ink blots on that piece of paper. If they can get AI to do it for them more efficiently, then they have more efficiently achieved the success they are expected to achieve. Why force yourself to produce all your own food (animal and vegetable, both) if you live in an urban area with grocery stores on every corner? That would be pointless work, as would writing your own papers from scratch when AI is more efficient… unless our real educational goal is something different. And here’s where we can’t pull off the grades bluff. If our real goal is expansion and enrichment of the mind, heart, and soul, rather than transcripts with a veneer of accomplishment, then we as teachers and parents need to show students what real education is. We can’t accomplish that by phrasing things in terms of grades: that was already instilling a false mentality, and now it doesn’t work any more. AI has called our bluff.
So what do we do? I found Pope Leo’s encyclical enlightening on this point. While it was touted as a document about AI, it ended up (rather circuitously sometimes) being about personal connection as a choice, using the Incarnate Christ as our model. As the Gospels show, He taught mostly in one-on-one or small group interactions, and using stories to bring His teaching to life. Transcripts identifying the lessons you sat through did not seem to be involved.
Technology of any kind does one of two things. It imprisons us or frees us. That makes it sound like the tech is doing the deciding, but the truth is that we are deciding. As one beloved fictional professor put it, “Soon we must all face the choice between what is right and what is easy.” Whereas formerly there were academic constraints that required hard work (I’m ancient enough to remember library research), that work stemmed from necessity more than choice. Now I don’t have to research. I have to choose between researching or not. I find this with adapting Shakespeare, which I have done with several plays. I don’t have to do the work of adapting any more. The bot can do it for me much more quickly and efficiently. But efficiently acquiring a usable script is not the point of the project. The point of doing a play is becoming intimately acquainted with the words and actions of fictional human beings, playing them out with live human beings in rehearsal, and then revealing the playing to a live human audience. You can’t accomplish that at 2x speed, and you can’t accomplish that if you start by ignoring the words. The more prominence efficiency takes, the less enrichment is likely to happen.
AI has freed us to choose personal connection in educational contexts rather than force us to have it. Maybe it’s partly just a matter of changing the way we speak. Some things I’ve found to be effective with students: tell them to phrase things in terms of how I can improve my writing, or how I can understand this better, rather than how I can improve my grade, and is there extra credit? Reassure them: if you work on improving your writing, the grade will improve anyway, so you don’t have to dwell on it. We can find ways to diminish grade-talk in favor of discovery-talk. Before, it was possible to hide behind an impersonal delivery of testing requirements and percentage calculations. Much easier, much safer. Now we can continue to have that, knowing how empty it is becoming, or we can pursue the much more intimidating but much more real (and Christlike) route.
So thank you, Claude, for calling our bluff. And thank you, Pope Leo, for reminding us that it isn’t actually about AI.