Let me begin by asking you a simple question and getting your creative thinking juices flowing. Getting you to think for yourself.
What is the relationship between these two images?
Now, you could have asked a computer but mostly likely (actually I guarantee), you’d have been up the digital divide without a paddle.
The first image is the shoe that Kelvin Kiptum wore this weekend in setting a world record in the marathon. It’s the Nike Dev 163. Not for public sale yet, only a few 100 made but coming to a store near you soon (for a lot of ).
The second image is of course, ChatGPT. It is Open AI’s hugely successful generative artificial intelligence chatbot. It will write anything you ask.
What both of these things have in common is that they are both forms of PET. Performance Enhancing Technologies. Or the more casual term - technology doping. In the first case, you’ll run faster, much faster. In the second case, you’ll write faster, much faster. Both leave us with profound ethical questions to sort through and also decisions regarding what is human performance itself.
In the case of the shoes, we have over the last 5 years almost every athletic record of note being broken. But it isn’t only records. The number of runners in what was once the top percentile is now astronomic. Something is broken. And the longer the race, the worse it gets (the effects of the doping are more pronounced). I feel sorry for colleagues who achieved such outstanding results but who now see so many underperformers, trampling on their records. Yiannis Kouros is one and he’s quite indignant and disgusted about it.
Both the shoes and ChatGPT are perfect examples of what technology does best, improving efficiencies. Examples of technology that in the right conditions, are forms of cheating. Cheating in this case being defined as achieving an outcome that you didn’t do on your own, of your own volition and ability.
Now that’s ok if you are writing a standard email to send to 1,000 people or if you just want to get across town fast while grabbing some exercise. They both aren’t ok when it comes to the yardstick of judging a human being and their abilities. Especially in competition and assessments.
Both too are good examples of where money talks. It’s all about money, results and not about the substance of these matters.
The carbon plated shoes that are now ubiquitous and getting faster by the day were given the green light by the authorities (in this case the IAAF) through a lot of promised money, donations and wining and dining on the part of sports companies.
ChatGPT sees big dollar signs as it enters into every conceivable educational product, promising to make children smarter, incredibly smart, high achievers.
But again, I return, they are both forms of cheating.
I have a long background in athletics and yes, performance enhancing technologies aren’t anything new. There are so many on the market. Back in my day, I remember sticking chunky nose clips up my nostrils in hopes of getting a few seconds a 5K, improvement. In swimming, we had the superman suits which led to a plethora of new records until the governing body of FINA stepped in and did the right thing and banned them outright.
In athletics, in education, what we want is a level playing field AND most importantly that the body, the person, the being, the entity is the performer - not the technology. And that’s the problem, lines have been crossed and I think we might be too late to pull ourselves back from the brink.
I’ve written a lot previously about ChatGPT and concur with Chomsky that it is indeed high tech plagarism. It does all the thinking, composition by itself. It doesn’t assist, it produces or reproduces if you like. But it takes away the agency, the effort of the individual.
Oh yeah, you can suggest that it might be used as a way of generating ideas, drafts etc … but also, isn’t that part of human performance, the very thing we want to develop and judge on an educational level?
I’ve heard the argument and know of several companies promoting the idea that generative AI will personalize education, tailor feedback and content to each student’s level and needs. Just in time teaching. I’m sceptical of the wizard being the curtain, the smoke and mirrors. We’ve heard this “personalization” tech hype previously.
We also have the argument that AI can give students instant correct of their writing. But isn’t sufficient? And in my own field, research is vastly on the side of no correction of writing - that it doesn’t make a wick of difference in student outcomes.
This paper is a nice read about generative AI. I could offer a hundred others but this is just what is on my desk at the moment. But essentially where I stand is that we want students to think for themselves. To question, to reflect, to amend, to redo, remix and to do it and get from A to Z on their own two feet. We don’t want to judge students by how well they use technology but by how well they, themselves think and perform.
And that’s the same with the shoes. We want to judge the performance of a human being not the performance of a shoe. Period.
So I throw this cautionary tale out there. It’s a slippery slope when you being to define intelligence through the lense of “efficiency”. It isn’t, it ain’t. That’s just the modern materialistic lens we are asked to look at intellgience through. I side with Einstein, intelligence, even a mathematical equation isn’t defined by how efficient it is but by how beautiful it is.
Technology Should Assist, Not Replace