Studies with AI, slaps with humans.
Students, shortcuts, generative AI & questions we must ask.
“Please write a greeting in hundred words for my readers which sounds friendly and warm.” No? Ok then.
Hello again, and thanks for having me in your inbox! I’m back as I look to move this to a biweekly missive, with permission to change that on whim! It’s one of those oddities that biweekly means ‘twice a week’ as well as ‘once every two weeks’. I mean the latter, clearly. Fortnightly, if you prefer.
This week’s main piece finds me eyeing the generative AI ripples in learning and education. Tools and outputs, yes (help me with this essay, what is cheating, anyway?); but also how we may be in the early stages of some fundamental shifts in thinking and development. Fascinating age throwing up tough questions. But first, if anyone you know deserves a slap, I have you sorted.
Friday Find: One Tight Slap!
Bloody Nuptials: A memorable fantasy wedding.
Nothing to Learn: Students, shortcuts, GenAI and questions we must ask.
With: Hallucinatory book list, labubu dolls, shoe-free homes.
1. Friday Find: One Tight Slap
One part bizarre- slap!
Two parts mockumentary- smack!
Three parts hilarity- smack!
Three parts freedom- slap!
One part head-shake- slap!
And there, ladies & gents, is your #FridayFind this week. This is the kind of fearless creative liberty that I love to see a brand embracing. Needless to say- watch to the end.
Enjoy, and slap/thank me later!
PS- Slap facials are a real thing, in case you were wondering and or/curious to try.
· Directed by Sukriti Tyagi. · Creative Shikha Gupta · Production MOTHERSHIP ·
2. Bloody Nuptials.
This week, that year. Probably one of the most memorable, powerful, visceral episodes on Television- definitely in this century- released on June 2, 2013. In early-mid ‘Peak TV’ era, this was very peak TV.
There are weddings, and then there are nuptials like the one in the ninth and penultimate episode of the third season of Game Of Thrones. The episode titled ‘The Rains of Castamere’ contained multiple story threads, but will always be known as the episode that featured the gut-wrenching Red Wedding.
There you go, take a moment.
Deep breaths. Let Caitlyn Stark’s raw scream echo and fade away.
Alright then.
3. There’s nothing to learn, so let’s not learn it.
When learning feels optional: students, shortcuts, generative AI and questions we must ask.
AI. It frequently leaves me with wonder, bafflement, concern, fascination. It might be the same for you, especially if AI tools are on the periphery of what you do every day at work, or in life. For many of us, search is replaced by ChatGPT; an instinctive trust, based on nothing more than convenience and a lifetime of using the internet with scant scepticism.
I recently found myself exploring how these feelings- and the tools that provoke them- are reshaping education and learning. An attempt to make sense of a learning landscape that’s shifting beneath our feet.
We encounter AI with different instincts: some dive in, driven by tech optimism and a dislike of being left behind. Others resist, not swayed by trend or FOMO. Many are indifferent, assuming the hype-train will eventually lose steam.Then there’s the growing tribe of proselytisers. These postures are not always mutually exclusive, but they do reflect how we engage, make choices, and adapt.
“The greatest worry in these times of generative AI is not that it may compromise human creativity or intelligence… but that it already has.”
_Robert Sternberg, psychology professor at Cornell University.
Gen Next.
On occasion in the last year or so, I’ve expressed mild relief at my offspring not being of an age to enter higher education or the workforce at this time. My hope, naive or otherwise, is that the world will find some balance with Artificial Intelligence in the coming years. There are too many variables right now — AI-triggered job losses one day, full human replacement the next, reversing AI initiatives another day.
What do we prepare these children for? A question that has been asked for some years now, has been super-charged with possibilities and unpredictability.
“I use AI a lot. Like, every day. And I do believe it could take away that critical-thinking part. But it’s just — now that we rely on it, we can’t really imagine living without it.”
Education.
Before we can prepare a society— or at least, a workforce— that lives with AI, we have much to deal with in reconciling education and our new intelligence companions.
That the use of GenAI tools like ChatGPT among college students is pervasive, should be fait accompli. Students are increasingly dependant on AI tools- moving swiftly from ‘ready and willing’ to try them, to needing and relying on them entirely. The ensuing implications start at cognitive development, through to academic integrity and go all the way to societal health, with multiple pit stops along the way.
Assignments- from essay writing to coding tasks- are being powered by AI support, often with minimal fear of repercussion. Current AI-detection systems have limitations; such tools will always struggle to keep up with better AI and smarter students. (“Make the essay sound less polished and add a few errors and typos”, even the dumbing down needn’t be done on your own. Young people always find a way.) Students view AI as a tool to manage workloads, with some drawing parallels to having a tutor. (I personally am weary of hearing the “AI Is merely a tool” trope, in countless contexts.)
“I spend so much time on TikTok. Hours and hours, until my eyes start hurting, which makes it hard to plan and do my schoolwork. With ChatGPT, I can write an essay in two hours that normally takes 12.”
As the use of AI for assignments becomes commonplace, the lines quickly blur between assistance and dishonesty. Is it cheating? Is it just moving with the times? Must the curriculum be questioned, if it is so easily bypassed, or outsourced? Educators are expressing concerns over the diminishing value of assessments and the difficulty in distinguishing genuine student work from AI-generated content.
Troy Jollimore— poet, philosopher, and Cal State ethics professor— lamented the difficulties in educating his students in an essay earlier this year. His role, he believes, is not to help them get a job, but to prepare them for life. Troy doesn’t see how their AI-assisted college journeys help with that.
“Massive numbers of students are going to emerge from university with degrees, and into the workforce, who are essentially illiterate. Both in the literal sense and in the sense of being historically illiterate and having no knowledge of their own culture, much less anyone else’s.”
In “Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College”, we learn of a student who only views college as a way to build his network and find funding for his startup ideas; using AI to cheat barely merits a second thought. In fact, his startup now is essentially just that- helping students beat the system. ( “We’re going to target the digital LSATs; digital GREs; all campus assignments, quizzes, and tests,” he says. “It will enable you to cheat on pretty much everything.”)
The New York Mag uses his story as a thread to explore many of these aspects. It goes on to note that Jollimore’s future may be here sooner than expected, “when you consider what a short window college really is. Already, roughly half of all undergrads have never experienced college without easy access to generative AI."
Jollimore himself looks round the first corner, “Of course, should such cheating continue to be widespread, it seems inevitable that all college degrees will be worth a good deal less and will perhaps cease to offer any advantage at all. But this outcome is surely of little comfort to those willing to work for their degrees, those who want those degrees to continue to be worth something and to mean something.”
His essay is worth a read.
“Someday maybe you’ll just plug a college education QChip into your cortex instead of spending four years on campus. You’d save a lot of tuition that way.”
_Duke professor Orin Starn
Efficiency .
It is one of the most seductive narratives around AI. Productivity, speed, efficiency. These are some of the most bandied-about benefits. But is efficiency the primary goal for human beings? It has been ingrained in us, in the productivity mantras, in the steps to ‘success,’ from a world shaped by economics, profit, capitalism and the imperative to sell and consume.
Young people, especially students, do not need efficiency. They need learning. (I say young people, I might mean people). Their learning is growth, forays into critical thinking, building cognitive skills.
Why do we write a composition or solve math problems? Not because we will become writers or novelists or journalists or accountants or scientists. We well might, but its done because we’re learning to construct/ deconstruct, research, lay down rationale, understand and argue. A prompt to ChatGPT negates much of that. Often, the first prompt leads to a slippery slope where reasoning and learning are entirely outsourced. I speak from experience.
I sometimes worry that I’m not really learning or retaining anything. I rely so much on AI that I don’t think I’d know how to solve certain problems without it.”
_research participant
We are so obsessed with productivity and efficiency, we are primed to embrace them at whatever cost. The reliance on AI is raising alarms; its potential to hinder students' development of essential skills like critical thinking, creativity, and problem-solving may outweigh the benefits- perceived or real- it brings to the classroom.
Where does all this AI leave our faculties? Free to engage in other, more fulfilling activities? Which corporation worth its salt wants that? Will our cognitive and creative abilities slowly wither away as we outsource our thinking to machines trained on machines trained on humans?
People who use [AI] well may be able to produce effective intellectual products—reports, experiments, business strategies, and the like—without themselves doing intellectual work. In such a future, how will we gauge our own mental vitality?
Separate recent studies by the Swiss Business School and Carnegie Mellon found that while GenAI usage once a week improved efficiency, it also inhibited critical thinking and fostered long-term over-reliance on the technology. Says one of the researchers, “to be critical of AI is difficult – you have to be disciplined. It is very challenging not to offload your critical thinking to these machines.”
“I cannot figure out what I am supposed to do with my life if these things can do anything I can do faster and with way more detail and knowledge.”
Pedagogically Perverse.
This is not relevant only to tertiary education, or early professionals. If anything, I view this as incredibly relevant for primary and secondary learning . AI tools also offer many possibilities to make the learning journey a better one- think the ability to personalise, customise, be flexible, learn self-paced, promote diversity, be more fair, reach wider.
The answer, counter-intuitively, might actually involve less digital time, not more. There is a discernible sense of FOMO when it comes to AI, across sectors. In education, there is no race. Or, there ought not to be.
In a recent episode of The Ezra Klein Show, we meet the measured and insightful Rebecca Winthrop, who is the Director of the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution, and recently co-authored “The Disengaged Teen: Helping Kids Learn Better, Feel Better, and Live Better.” In a riveting conversation, she touches upon the same FOMO many of us feel, but from an educational perspective- warning that parents, teachers, students, all in the ecosystem must not be carried away by it.
One of the many other relevant points she makes- the heart of it, in many ways- is intent. The intent of the users, but also the intent of the makers. Most GenAI tools today are made for profit, power, to grab Artificial Intelligence real estate, attention, and dependency. AI tools used by children, should be made for children. This does not happen without oversight, and regulation.
In many circles, these are bad words.
Yet, the view of AI as a collaborator or tutor persists. In a recent paper on Teaching in Higher Education, experts chose to label this understanding as ‘pedagogically perverse’.
“GenAI systems are constitutively epistemically irresponsible. We argue that the expectation on tertiary students to assume responsibility for their so-called ‘tutors’ and ‘collaborators’ is pedagogically perverse… Moreover, to the extent that GenAI teaching systems replace students’ interaction with human teachers, it will be increasingly difficult for students to develop the skills and motivation to hold GenAI outputs to disciplinary standards.”
I don’t think anyone has ever paid such pure attention to me and my thinking and my questions . . . ever.
It’s made me rethink all my interactions with people.”
Wanting It.
A lot of this comes back to intent. What do we look to use these powerful tools for, and how? With frequent use of AI are we (and students) going to be thinkers or consumers? Which is more useful, more sustainable… and which is seemingly easier?
Despite all the doomsday nuggets we have touched on, there are numerous examples of how people’s interactions with these tools can be meaningful, useful, helpful; providing insight, exploration, clarity; being patient, relentless, personal.
You can no longer make students do the reading or the writing. So what’s left? Only this: give them work they want to do. And help them want to do it.
Unfortunately, in systems geared toward results and success (versus, say, learning, understanding and empathy), the vast majority of use will be cynical. The tools, and their use, seem largely inevitable, railing against them might be of little use. All of this seems to circle back to reimagining the way we learn, educate and develop.
The questions here are many— how we teach, how we assess and indeed, what we teach. Education already risks being too output-oriented; with AI, it risks becoming entirely transactional. Soon, all-important results may hold little value- especially if those achieving them no longer understand the why. AI is changing what students do, and it may well reshape who they are becoming. Will they be curious, questioning minds, or efficient carriers of information? The future isn’t here yet, but the questions very much are.
As Joshua Rothman put it in his exploration around the worth of trying, “It feels strange to imagine that, someday soon, we might need to start reminding ourselves to think.”
Sources & Reading
· Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College·
· Don’t ask what AI can do for us, ask what it is doing to us’ ·
· I used to Teach Students, Now I Catch Cheats ·
· My Losing Battle Against AI Cheating ·
· Pedagogically Perverse: why GenAI systems are neither collaborators nor tutors ·
· Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence? · Why even try if you have AI? ·
· Educating Kids in the Age of A.I. / The Ezra Klein Show ·
· Kicked Out for Creating AI to Cheat, Raises Millions to Turn It Into a Startup ·
Post Script.
In some irony, here is a new short film on our obsession with efficiency, titled My Robot and Me.
Oh, everything in it is AI-generated.
Masala Peanuts
(where I share stories or tidbits I find interesting).
Interesting- and mildly amusing- to read about this Australian’s endeavour to become a ‘shoes-off’ house. It was more complicated than they thought. This is widely common in Singapore- where I live- and in many parts of India, where I grew up.
What’s a Labubu doll? A full-blown hit, is what. Selling out worldwide, seen dangling from the bags of Rihanna and Dua Lipa. If you don’t know much about it, check in here and here. Its maker is now worth more than the makers of Barbie, Hello Kitty, and Transformers- combined!
Hallucination alert! The Chicago Sun Times published a book recommendation list for the summer. It included books/authors that don’t exist at all, books by real authors that they never wrote, and oh, some real books too. An embarrassing- and frankly, ridiculous- AI snafu. Such lists are meant to reflect opinion, curation, taste. Human taste.
Students find mystifying and very implausible the idea that
“education might be valuable not because it gets you a bigger paycheque but because, in a fundamental way, it gives you access to a more rewarding life.”
_Troy Jollimore