AI... Oh boy

     

This post will be a bit vulnerable for me. AI was becoming a major part of education and daily life during my senior year of college last year. Many of my friends used it consistently in school, and I had a few times, especially near the end of my college experience. It was when AI created a fake quote about a text that I first realized it was not helping me. Further, I learned about the negative consequences of using generative AI regularly, on the environment and vulnerable communities, but also on one's brain. The research is still new. When entering the classroom space as an English teacher, I knew that this would be a problem. I also knew that AI detectors are fallible. On the first few essay assignments, if any assignment resembled AI, insofar as the style didn't match the student's, the quotes were hallucinated, the content was factually incorrect about the text, and/or there were levels of words and grammar that the student could not explain, I found myself getting angry. I think the desire to catch a student "cheating" with AI was a moment of confirmation bias, and in a way, it was a way to make me feel less bad about my own usage. In senior year, I was not using AI as a tool, though some of my college professors encouraged it, but rather as a way to take the lazy way out of the assignment. I expected that some of my students would do the same. And perhaps it was my own expectation of them to do this that they did. It is in this vein that I understand Galland and Rettinger's argument about how the root cause of cheating is more of a problem than the cheating itself, and that my role as an educator is not to catch a student cheating, but instead inspire them to want to learn and not cheat. In regard to Ferlazzo's argument, I still have resistance to naming generative AI as a tool because of my own experience and lack of understanding of it. Even further, I would feel like a fraud if I used AI but don't let my students. I have allowed them to similarly use writing assistance with Grammarly, that I believe uses AI, but I am not resolved on whether this actually helps their writing skills. I think my overall resistance to AI right now really comes from fear. I don't want to let AI into our classroom because I am afraid it will stunt students' learning. I just want to do the best things for them, and I don't know if AI is that. When we switched to mostly paper assignments and reading, students' learning and engagement went up astronomically. I don't know how AI fits into that picture. I also don't want my students to get into the habit of allowing something or someone else to think for them. That is a matter of not just their future success but also their safety as democratic citizens. If anything, I try to teach them the importance of critical thinking and practicing literacy skills. I do not necessarily think that AI is the opposite of these things, but I do not currently have the bandwidth nor training to teach them about how to use AI as a tool responsibly to augment their learning and thinking. This may also reveal my own beliefs. I think that students are capable of this discernment, but I think that they need some guidance for how to use tech like this responsibly, especially as I know that I do as well. As I write this, I am learning that I may be more open to inviting AI as a tool into class for students than I initially thought, but I do not feel ready to facilitate that. I still feel hesitant about using it as an educator, even though I understand where Ferlazzo is coming from. I am sure it makes things easier, but I don't know if easier is better to me. It's not like I'm atoning for my AI usage in the past currently, but I learned a lot from my own motivations when using it, and I think I unfairly apply those to everyone. Below is a picture from a slide deck I used when discussing Plato's Allegory of the Cave, in which we discussed how there can be modern constructions of the "cave" when allowing other sources to think for you. We had a rich discussion in class.