This is brilliant Elizabeth. What I worry about is the pressures students face and the temptation of shortcuts, which will just cheat them of training their brains to think freely, outside the confines of the garbage and misinformation they’re constantly fed. To avoid wrestling with the beast, to avoid failing, a necessary doorway we all have to pass through if we want to learn, grow, and combat constraints. This generation that is taught to do everything quickly and without error. Everything fired at high speed. No. Slow down. Think. Make mistakes and build slowly and with errors. Higher education shouldn’t be about grades, outcomes, and gaming the system. It should be about the incredible privilege of getting to spend 4 (or more)years of study learning to think critically about the world.
I think back to when I was in high school, when I had to attend classes for 6-7 hours a day, then each class gave me an hour or two of homework. I was also expected to get my eight hours of sleep every night, while also socializing and participating in extracurricular activities and eating right and being physically active and and and and...
If 16-year-old me had been given a tool to shortcut *something* on that list, I can totally see myself doing it. Consequences outside of my own bubble be damned.
I would love to know how that discussion goes on day one of your class. Would likely reveal the pulse of your class and who is likely to use it or not I would think. I can't imagine what it must be like to have to grade these papers! I like the point you make, you're not there to police but to teach people how to think.
Thank you so much for writing this. I can only imagine what it's like to be a teacher in this era of AI mania. I'm an author and there are easily a half-dozen copyright violation lawsuits going on. Pretty much all of my books (almost 50) have been pirated and used to train AI so other people can use it and call themselves writers. People think it's a quick cheat or easy fix. I'm not sure if it makes a person stupid or if they were already there to begin with and AI just allows them to get comfortable, but I really hope someone gets hold of the reins on Gen AI soon.
I loved the reading salon format as an undergrad. A small group of students sitting around the table, having a real conversation about the book we’d read and how it connected to other books from the course. An emphasis on doing the reading and showing up, with a few papers sprinkled throughout (which were better for having some of the ideas hashed out in discussion). Maybe fewer papers, crafted more slowly and in conversation with others, is a possible model? Maybe students would feel sillier messaging ChatGPT for talking points in real time than they would promoting it to write a paper in private.
Also, I agree that AI makes us stupid. But it also makes us boring! Which feels related but also distinctly bad. I’m trying to notice AI-tinged writing more quickly so that I can stop reading and move on to something that won’t infect my style.
I am so glad that Christina Patterson shared this, otherwise I might have missed it. Lovely to make your virtual acquaintance, and thank you for writing this piece.
I have been struggling for several weeks now to put into words what I am feeling about AI as a 20-year veteran of freelance writing in the marketing space who has watched those two decades of work disintegrate under the pressure of AI as a productivity, boosting money, saving mechanism for companies of all sizes.
I am so sorry to hear that. Claude has infiltrated your workplace to such a degree, and I share your feelings of both trepidation and a kind of low level grief. You capture her so beautifully what we, as a culture, seem willing to sacrifice on the altar of capitalism under the motto of cheaper, faster, more.
I do not have any answers or even much comfort to offer. Truth be told I am considering several different kinds of career changes at this point. I do not know what the future may hold, but I am going to hang onto my relationship with words, even though it often seems futile and even Laughable. I will never stop believing that it’s worth fighting for.
Thanks for this comment and lovely to meet you as well! Higher ed has the potential to offer some resistance or at least a counterpart to the altar of capitalism--to ask the question about what we are worshipping and why. But discovering that Claude is seamlessly integrated with my on-line syllabus (without my knowledge or permission) is terrifying precisely because it is about the deals that higher ed and capitalism are making behind the curtain!
Excellent. And honestly, it feels like every generation has already been using a kind of artificial intelligence — plagiarizing other people’s ideas instead of developing their own. Social media is basically mass plagiarism on steroids, with constant access to everyone else’s data, at all times, from anywhere.
AI is just the next evolution. Or more like de-evolution … and it was already underway before we even called it AI.
AI isn’t the problem. The problem is that it accelerates the quickening of the lazy and the stupid — a stupidity that was already multiplying at scale.
Makes me think of Marshall McLuhan. What would he say about this circus?
Brilliant, thank you. "Writing is thinking", it's that simple. I hope we can put the cat back in the bag with AI – you'd think the numerous AI-related suicides would put a fire under the relevant people.
In the interim, I'm going to try to refer to "artificial intelligence" by another, more accurate, less sci-fi term that I first saw used in an article last year (I think in the Financial Times): "applied statistics". Rather takes the wind out of its self-important, algorithmic sails, I think.
(ps. In case anyone is interested, I went looking for the FT article that I remember the term "applied statistics" appearing in -- it's a piece from June 2nd 2033, an interview with author Ted Chiang. Happy reading!)
A detailed and caring article. That’s why I’ve always argued for an oral exam where students voice their ideas. We can explore if they are original and match up to written ideas expressed! I realise this takes time and resources. It can work from primary school upwards to rigorous PhD vivas for example!
The narrative levels of moral reasoning are often impoverished in our teaching and there’s needs to be an embedded curricula framework to facilitate this. This can work across genres.
I have a colleague who has students read their essay drafts in class out loud for feedback. I'm considering trying this as well. Students could, of course, still use AI to write essays in this scenario but they would need to be able to answer questions about both content and form so would have to engage in thinking about the choices that AI made if they did not write the work themselves. So at least some thinking required!
I teach writing to teenagers, and what I tell them is that I don't know what I think until I write it down. Because the process of writing itself is the process of examining our ideas and fleshing them out, sometimes to find that we don't like our ideas anymore. Now that they might be using AI, I tell them that I am only interested in what their weird brains come up with. Luckily, I don't have to grade, so if they use AI, I tell them, they are only hurting themselves. I hope any of this sinks in, and it makes me thankful that I teach creative writing so that at least they have to be creative about how they use the AI! I can imagine the bland essays you're going to get and it makes me sad...
Which is exactly what the tech bros and the fascist (and fascist-adjacent) politicians want. A populace that can no longer think, no longer wants to think. Because thinking means questioning cruelty and all the -isms that plague us. If we think, we push back on regression and intentional harm. And our current "leadership" can't have that.
The only remedy for this is a broad societal shift that takes decades to happen. I’m very sorry to say that I think it’s all downhill for teachers from here for quite a while yet (and then we have vastly bigger problems to worry about).
This is generally speaking; each community can and should fight it, but the war is lost.
I have this crazy fantasy that in the world of AI, once all prose sounds exactly like warmed over cream of wheat, suddenly the pendulum will shift and people will crave the sound of non-algorithm-generated sentences, of human-crafted ideas. Students will flock to humanities classes! Our photocopying budget will triple!
I love this so much. Thank you. I love writing, (I also hate writing, it’s brutal and has nearly broken me at times, but that’s another story) and I love what it has given me; not the job, yadda yadda, but especially the close reading, the discovering of something inside of what I’ve been working with for months, years, that occasionally happens, and then I run out and tell the first person I see (usually my partner or whatever friend has the misfortune to meet me over coffee next), and it ends up being a conversation that goes as well as one where you’re telling someone about a dream you had. (Case in point: have you ever thought about all the meanings of “fly”? Including mechanical ones?!). What I mean is what I like best about writing is what it has done to me. And I am so grateful for all of the moments of my mind being windswept by others whose writing I get to read. And whose work is now being stolen by AI on a perfunctory basis. I feel sad that students are missing the chance to learn to think at all. I use ungrading these days, not as a way around AI but because I believe in it as a useful pedagogical practice, so the sad Grammarly program seems even sadder. I don’t know what is to come in the future but I’m going down with the ship of writing and thinking, that’s for sure.
Yes--the moment when your mind stumbles on something absolutely new through the grace of the struggle to put something on the page! The challenge for me is how to communicate both this experience and the value of this experience to students. I am committed to going down with the ship as well.
This is brilliant Elizabeth. What I worry about is the pressures students face and the temptation of shortcuts, which will just cheat them of training their brains to think freely, outside the confines of the garbage and misinformation they’re constantly fed. To avoid wrestling with the beast, to avoid failing, a necessary doorway we all have to pass through if we want to learn, grow, and combat constraints. This generation that is taught to do everything quickly and without error. Everything fired at high speed. No. Slow down. Think. Make mistakes and build slowly and with errors. Higher education shouldn’t be about grades, outcomes, and gaming the system. It should be about the incredible privilege of getting to spend 4 (or more)years of study learning to think critically about the world.
Thank you Melissa! And I agree completely about slowing down in order to think. It is both hard and important to make space for that.
I think back to when I was in high school, when I had to attend classes for 6-7 hours a day, then each class gave me an hour or two of homework. I was also expected to get my eight hours of sleep every night, while also socializing and participating in extracurricular activities and eating right and being physically active and and and and...
If 16-year-old me had been given a tool to shortcut *something* on that list, I can totally see myself doing it. Consequences outside of my own bubble be damned.
I would love to know how that discussion goes on day one of your class. Would likely reveal the pulse of your class and who is likely to use it or not I would think. I can't imagine what it must be like to have to grade these papers! I like the point you make, you're not there to police but to teach people how to think.
I will keep you posted!
This is powerful and moving and I'll be sharing this with every student I know.
Thank you!
Thank you so much for writing this. I can only imagine what it's like to be a teacher in this era of AI mania. I'm an author and there are easily a half-dozen copyright violation lawsuits going on. Pretty much all of my books (almost 50) have been pirated and used to train AI so other people can use it and call themselves writers. People think it's a quick cheat or easy fix. I'm not sure if it makes a person stupid or if they were already there to begin with and AI just allows them to get comfortable, but I really hope someone gets hold of the reins on Gen AI soon.
I loved the reading salon format as an undergrad. A small group of students sitting around the table, having a real conversation about the book we’d read and how it connected to other books from the course. An emphasis on doing the reading and showing up, with a few papers sprinkled throughout (which were better for having some of the ideas hashed out in discussion). Maybe fewer papers, crafted more slowly and in conversation with others, is a possible model? Maybe students would feel sillier messaging ChatGPT for talking points in real time than they would promoting it to write a paper in private.
Also, I agree that AI makes us stupid. But it also makes us boring! Which feels related but also distinctly bad. I’m trying to notice AI-tinged writing more quickly so that I can stop reading and move on to something that won’t infect my style.
Yes--AI writing is flacid. Warmed over pablum. So inoffensive as to be deeply offensive.
That is where the magic happens--when it suddenly feels safe and deeply pleasurable to share ideas!
I am so glad that Christina Patterson shared this, otherwise I might have missed it. Lovely to make your virtual acquaintance, and thank you for writing this piece.
I have been struggling for several weeks now to put into words what I am feeling about AI as a 20-year veteran of freelance writing in the marketing space who has watched those two decades of work disintegrate under the pressure of AI as a productivity, boosting money, saving mechanism for companies of all sizes.
I am so sorry to hear that. Claude has infiltrated your workplace to such a degree, and I share your feelings of both trepidation and a kind of low level grief. You capture her so beautifully what we, as a culture, seem willing to sacrifice on the altar of capitalism under the motto of cheaper, faster, more.
I do not have any answers or even much comfort to offer. Truth be told I am considering several different kinds of career changes at this point. I do not know what the future may hold, but I am going to hang onto my relationship with words, even though it often seems futile and even Laughable. I will never stop believing that it’s worth fighting for.
Thanks for this comment and lovely to meet you as well! Higher ed has the potential to offer some resistance or at least a counterpart to the altar of capitalism--to ask the question about what we are worshipping and why. But discovering that Claude is seamlessly integrated with my on-line syllabus (without my knowledge or permission) is terrifying precisely because it is about the deals that higher ed and capitalism are making behind the curtain!
Excellent. And honestly, it feels like every generation has already been using a kind of artificial intelligence — plagiarizing other people’s ideas instead of developing their own. Social media is basically mass plagiarism on steroids, with constant access to everyone else’s data, at all times, from anywhere.
AI is just the next evolution. Or more like de-evolution … and it was already underway before we even called it AI.
AI isn’t the problem. The problem is that it accelerates the quickening of the lazy and the stupid — a stupidity that was already multiplying at scale.
Makes me think of Marshall McLuhan. What would he say about this circus?
Brilliant, thank you. "Writing is thinking", it's that simple. I hope we can put the cat back in the bag with AI – you'd think the numerous AI-related suicides would put a fire under the relevant people.
In the interim, I'm going to try to refer to "artificial intelligence" by another, more accurate, less sci-fi term that I first saw used in an article last year (I think in the Financial Times): "applied statistics". Rather takes the wind out of its self-important, algorithmic sails, I think.
Yes--kind of like the "Genius Bar" at the Apple Store. "Intelligence" is a misnomer ... I like "applied statistics"!
(ps. In case anyone is interested, I went looking for the FT article that I remember the term "applied statistics" appearing in -- it's a piece from June 2nd 2033, an interview with author Ted Chiang. Happy reading!)
A detailed and caring article. That’s why I’ve always argued for an oral exam where students voice their ideas. We can explore if they are original and match up to written ideas expressed! I realise this takes time and resources. It can work from primary school upwards to rigorous PhD vivas for example!
The narrative levels of moral reasoning are often impoverished in our teaching and there’s needs to be an embedded curricula framework to facilitate this. This can work across genres.
I have a colleague who has students read their essay drafts in class out loud for feedback. I'm considering trying this as well. Students could, of course, still use AI to write essays in this scenario but they would need to be able to answer questions about both content and form so would have to engage in thinking about the choices that AI made if they did not write the work themselves. So at least some thinking required!
I teach writing to teenagers, and what I tell them is that I don't know what I think until I write it down. Because the process of writing itself is the process of examining our ideas and fleshing them out, sometimes to find that we don't like our ideas anymore. Now that they might be using AI, I tell them that I am only interested in what their weird brains come up with. Luckily, I don't have to grade, so if they use AI, I tell them, they are only hurting themselves. I hope any of this sinks in, and it makes me thankful that I teach creative writing so that at least they have to be creative about how they use the AI! I can imagine the bland essays you're going to get and it makes me sad...
Yes--the blandness is often the tell of an AI produced essay. That and correct grammar.
Thank you for writing this
Thanks for your kind comment!
"No thinking involved."
Which is exactly what the tech bros and the fascist (and fascist-adjacent) politicians want. A populace that can no longer think, no longer wants to think. Because thinking means questioning cruelty and all the -isms that plague us. If we think, we push back on regression and intentional harm. And our current "leadership" can't have that.
Agree! I think this is at the heart of the general attack on higher ed that is being launched from the right. Cruelty without question is the agenda.
A properly educated populace does not vote Republican in sufficient numbers. And they know that.
Let us know the response to your question.
It is all so incredibly important, that need to think.
I will! And I agree--making the space for thinking is the most important thing.
The only remedy for this is a broad societal shift that takes decades to happen. I’m very sorry to say that I think it’s all downhill for teachers from here for quite a while yet (and then we have vastly bigger problems to worry about).
This is generally speaking; each community can and should fight it, but the war is lost.
I have this crazy fantasy that in the world of AI, once all prose sounds exactly like warmed over cream of wheat, suddenly the pendulum will shift and people will crave the sound of non-algorithm-generated sentences, of human-crafted ideas. Students will flock to humanities classes! Our photocopying budget will triple!
I love this so much. Thank you. I love writing, (I also hate writing, it’s brutal and has nearly broken me at times, but that’s another story) and I love what it has given me; not the job, yadda yadda, but especially the close reading, the discovering of something inside of what I’ve been working with for months, years, that occasionally happens, and then I run out and tell the first person I see (usually my partner or whatever friend has the misfortune to meet me over coffee next), and it ends up being a conversation that goes as well as one where you’re telling someone about a dream you had. (Case in point: have you ever thought about all the meanings of “fly”? Including mechanical ones?!). What I mean is what I like best about writing is what it has done to me. And I am so grateful for all of the moments of my mind being windswept by others whose writing I get to read. And whose work is now being stolen by AI on a perfunctory basis. I feel sad that students are missing the chance to learn to think at all. I use ungrading these days, not as a way around AI but because I believe in it as a useful pedagogical practice, so the sad Grammarly program seems even sadder. I don’t know what is to come in the future but I’m going down with the ship of writing and thinking, that’s for sure.
Yes--the moment when your mind stumbles on something absolutely new through the grace of the struggle to put something on the page! The challenge for me is how to communicate both this experience and the value of this experience to students. I am committed to going down with the ship as well.
Oops: there NOT there’s !