Let me begin by stating that although I dislike the hype, the marketing cycle, the torrid tech optimism surrounding the use of generative AI, ChatGPT and the like, I DO believe this “word processor” has some valid, valuable uses. In education and in many fields.
That said, I think the downside, is much larger. If I know anything about the human soul, the vast majority of us will default to trust, will bend to authority and will take the more traveled road, and that road is one where we use generative AI all the time, automatically because it has become embedded in our use patterns.
I have two main concerns regarding generative AI in education.
The decline of human agency
Language pollution
There are other concerns.
Hallucination, inaccuracy, it just can be plain wrong much of the time. Attribution, copyright. It basically is created on the works of many others.
Plagarism, authority. Chomsky has called generative AI a high tech, super plagarism tool.
Cost. Environmental destruction. Immense, the heat, the severs to keep this thing running.
Privacy. It has no notion of this. It will not be able to keep any secrets. Language Death. Because of the cost, only a handful of languages will become AI approved.
Alignment. It as no values. Thus, the AI system we will use is aligned without foreknowledge, moral code, may I even say, a thought to decency.
The Decline of Human Agency
The danger here is that teachers and students alike will opt for the easy road and just click a button and start from there - with the language put together by generative AI, an entity which “doesn’t know” and which works on a cut and paste statistical predictive model basis. Basically, AI’s credo is “It doesn’t mean a thing to me.”
As AI is integrated into our browsing experience, we’ll be enticed at all stages of thought, of research, of curiosity, to just “prompt” AI for help. Eventually, we’ll just stop prompting piecemeal and ask it for the whole solution.
I disagree with this deference to the authority of an algorithm, without soul, without spirit or self-agency. The answers it gives aren’t important. It’s the process that we are losing in asking it to do what we should be doing through the wonderful apparatus we’ve been given - the ability to think (I don’t use the word “brain” - thought is much more an embodied and correct word, IMHO).
Human consciousness is a precious gift. The consciousness of all organic, self-reproducing life is sacred, divine. Yet, for example, many teachers and school districts are allowing AI to grade student work. It befuddles me, that others are so deep down the materialistic, reductionist rabbit hole that they can’t see how destructive this is - turning a machine into an authority over human activity.
Human agency is lost as we don’t think for ourselves. And I’m not crying wolf here. Generative AI is unlike any tool we’ve ever seen for it produces complete written texts - arguments, details, pronouncements, plans, essays, images, poems, and on and on … It is not a tool, it is a replacement for our own agency.
A thought experiment. What if you could climb Mt. Everest without leaving your home? No danger of death, oxygen deprivation, freezing to death. Just the thrill of being someone who has climbed to the highest point on earth. Would you do so? Would you pay for such?
It’s an interesting question because essentially, that is what we are doing every time we start with an AI generated text and then polish it and present it as our own. Did we really write that paper? Did we really, truly climb Mt. Everest? What is the goal without the suffering, the learning, the journey?
We are risking so much agency, our ability to develop, create, celebrate the human experiment we are - when we default to AI generation for all but the most mundane of tasks.
Language Pollution.
Already, the internet is dead. Less than 50% of all activity on the internet is done by real people, engaging with its content. Soon, with AI generation, this will swell. So too the fake, false content. The AI generated content mill will pollute the whole online universe. We will be lost in a polluted sea of information, data, manipulative, false thought.
This is horrific. Language is the central nervous system of a society, the means by which we discern reality, know what is going on and react appropriately. How will this change once AI generation goes into full mill mode? Or is the change already upon us, as we hazard to know what is true, what is false? As a shared cultural reality melts before our eyes and everything becomes a screaming match of ideological drivel because we no longer have any facts to stand upon - so we default to our own biases, fed by a false AI generative machine.
It will only take a few years. Then the reality between human and AI generated thought and text will be all but gone. The onslaught has already started. The bar is lowering. The waters are graying. Soon, we won’t even have the ability to come up for air. We will have to swim in these gray polluted AI fed waters. It will make the tower of Babel’s destruction look like a bar mitzvah.
Lost In A Land Of Language Pollution