a word to my students

The first thing to know is that I don’t call it AI. When those of us in the humanities talk about “AI in education” what we almost always mean is “chat interfaces to large language models.” There are many other kinds of machine-learning endeavors but they’re not immediately relevant to most of us. And anyway, whether they’re “intelligent” is up for debate. So the word I’ll use here is “chatbot,” and the question is: What’s my policy? What do I think about your using chatbots for work in my class?

I’ll start to answer that by turning it around: Would my stated policy have any effect whatsoever on your actions? Pause and think about it for a moment: Would it?

For some of you the answer will be: No. And to you I say: thanks for the candor.

Others among you will reply: Yes. And probably you mean it … or think you mean it. But will your compliance survive a challenge? When you’re sitting around with friends and every single one of them except you is using a chatbot to get work done, will you be able to resist the temptation to join them? When they copy and paste and then head merrily out for tacos, will you stay in your room and grind? Maybe you will, once, or twice, or even three times, but … eventually…. I mean, come on: we all know how this story ends.

So let’s be clear about three things. The first is that if I make assignments which you can get chatbots to do for you, that’s what you’ll do. The second is that if I have a “no chatbot” policy and you use chatbots, you’re cheating. The third is that cheating is lying: it is saying (either implicitly or explicitly) that you’ve done something you have not done. You are claiming and presenting to me as your work what is not your work.

Now, this has several consequences, and one of them — if I don’t catch you — is that I will end up affirming that you have certain skills and abilities that you do not in fact have. Which makes me, however unintentionally, complicit in your lie. That reflects badly on me.

But that makes a problem for you, too, because sooner or later the time will come — perhaps in a job interview, or an interview for a place in a graduate program, or your second week in a new job that doesn’t have you in front of a computer all day — when your lack of the skills you claim to have will become evident, to your great embarrassment and frustration. You’re probably not worried about that now, because one of the most universal of human tendencies is — I use the technical term — Kicking The Can Down The Road. Almost all human beings will put off dealing with a problem if they possibly can; the only ones among us who don’t are those who have learned through painful experience the costs of can-kicking. (This is in fact one of the very few ways in which we Olds are superior to you Youngs: we’ve been there, we know.)

And then, you know, I’m a Christian, and I’ve read the parable of the talents. I want to see you multiply your gifts, not leave you exactly as you were when you came to my class, only with a little more experience in writing chatbot prompts and significantly lower cognitive function.

(Robert W. Gehl: “I think generative AI is incredibly destructive to our teaching of university students. We ask them to read, reflect upon, write about, and discuss ideas. That’s all in service of our goal to help train them to be critical citizens. GenAI can simulate all of the steps: it can summarize readings, pull out key concepts, draft text, and even generate ideas for discussion. But that would be like going to the gym and asking a robot to lift weights for you.”)

Perhaps the most worrisome consequence of this whole ridiculous circus in which (a) you’re trying not to get caught cheating and (b) your professors are trying to catch you cheating is how thoroughly dehumanizing it is to all of us. All of us end up acting like we’re in a video-game boss fight. Modern education, with its emphasis on credentialing and therefore on grades, is already dehumanizing: as my friend Tal Brewer from the UVA says, we’re not teachers, we’re the Sorting Hat. The chatbot world makes that all crap so much worse. Now we’re Bowser and the Sorting Hat.

But me, I just want to help you to be a better reader, a better writer, and a better thinker. If you can learn these skills, and the habits that enable them, I believe you will be a better person — not in every way, maybe not even in the ways that matter most, but in significant ways. You’ll be a little more alert, a little more aware; you’ll make more nuanced judgments and will be able to express those judgments more clearly. You may even increase your self-knowledge. I want to do what I can to encourage those virtues.

I don’t want to be trying to outwit you and avoid being outwitted. I don‘t want to enable your can-kicking. I don’t want to affirm that you have skills you don’t have. I don’t want to have to say, at the end of the day, that the only thing I taught you was better prompt engineering. Above all, I don’t want to make assignments that become a proximate occasion of sin for you: I don’t want to be your tempter. So I simply must — I am obliged as a teacher and a Christian — keep the chatbots out of our class, as best I can. If you pray, please pray for me.