I Fucking Hate AI

 I opened up Bluesky this morning and saw this skeet:

No. Just fucking no. AI doesn’t enhance the learning process, it interferes with it. Because the process of research, the process of writing, the process of revision all result in greater learning. And AI robs you of that. AI is a fucking thief, in more ways than one. Let’s take a stroll through Karen’s educational history to see what AI would have stolen from me. . 

It’s May of 1976. I’m a couple of weeks shy of my high school graduation. I have a paper due in English class, but although I knew what I wanted to write, every time I started writing I got bogged down. Because of my schedule, I didn’t have time to just sit down and write for long enough to figure out what was wrong.

I went to my English teacher, explained the problem, and asked if I could turn the paper in at the final exam, a few days after it was due. He looked at me over the top of his readers, eyebrows raised and forehead wrinkled, and said I could do that, but by then he would have graded everyone else’s paper and would be concentrating solely on mine, so it would need to be very good to get a good grade.  I swallowed audibly and thanked him.

That weekend I was finally able to write. The act of writing helped me realize what my problem was. I kept trying to start my argument in the introduction rather than just…introduce it. Once I figured that out, the rest of the paper was easy. I had done the research needed and organized my argument, so all I had to do was write. But that realization of what was holding me up made me really understand the purpose of an introduction, which affected every paper, essay question, presentation I wrote since then, including 10 years of college/grad school, 40 years of working…and this blog (see the first paragraph for a good introduction…)

I don’t remember what I wrote, but I do remember that teacher coming to me in the middle of my English final, dropping the paper I had turned in earlier on the table, and saying, “It was worth the wait.” And I remember the purpose of an essay introduction.

I also remember the writing prompt. We had to pick one word from James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, follow that word through the book, and discuss the theme that word represents. I picked the word water. 

Now, that I think that could be a ChatGPT prompt. I could probably get something I could turn into an acceptable paper. I would have been able to turn it in on time, which would have been good, because the paper sure wouldn’t have been worth any wait. I also wouldn’t have become a better writer, because I wouldn’t have had to fix my introduction problem. 

Fast forward 4 years to early August 1980, and I’m a few weeks away from my graduation from Penn State.  It’s Thursday afternoon and I have a philosophy paper due Friday at 4 PM. But it’s also $2 Iced Tea night at Mr. C’s (IYKYK), so… 

I went to C’s for a few hours and a few Iced Teas, and a lot of dancing with random men. (One Mickey Rooney look alike propositioned me, offering to make it “worth [my] while.” I declined, saying I had a paper to write. General friend consensus later was I should have found out how much.) I made it back to my dorm around 1 AM and started writing. Once again, I had all of my research done and organized, I knew how to write a good introduction, and my electric typewriter and my bottle of Liquid Paper were ready. 

In that class we read books and plays like Sophocles’ Antigone, St. Augustine’s City of God, Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Sartre’s No Exit, some stuff from Freud and others I can’t remember. We had to write the paper using examples from the class readings only to support our argument. The prompt I chose was “If man doubts or denies the existence of an omnipotent being, from where does he get his sense of morality?” 

About 12 hours later I was done. I turned it in by 2 PM, not 4 PM, because I had to be back in the dorm by 2:30 to get a good seat in the TV lounge to watch General Hospital at 3. This was the summer of Luke and Laura (IYKYK), it was a Friday, so you had to get there early if you wanted a seat because that lounge got crowded. 

I don’t remember much of what I wrote in that paper (I was either half drunk or hung over while I wrote it after all). I do remember some analogy about a well not being the source of water, but just the means that it’s brought to the surface from the underground spring, and man not being the source of morality but merely the means through which an omnipotent being brings it into the world… But as an atheist, it did help prepare me for a lifetime of people asking how do I know what’s right or wrong if I don’t believe in God, and aren’t I afraid of going to hell if I don’t do what God wants me to do…

Again, it could probably be a ChatGPT prompt.  Throw the question in, list all the class readings, and tell it to generate a five page paper using at least seven of those sources. But I wouldn’t learn anything about morality, I wouldn’t codify my thoughts on morality as an atheist, and I wouldn’t have easy answers for all those judgmental theists I’ve dealt with over the years.

One more example. It’s the early 90s, and I’m working on a PhD in educational psychology, again at Penn State. I’m taking a class on the psychology of reading (with Frank DiVesta. Again, IYKYK.). There was no textbook for the class, but instead we had at least a half dozen journal articles to read every week. A few of us decided to form a study group and divvy up the reading. We had to read one or two articles, write up an abstract for it, and develop at least two potential essay or discussion questions about the article. In addition, I offered to type up my class notes and provide copies for everybody.

When I say I typed up my class notes, I mean I reorganized them into an outline form, expanded on parts that were skimpy, added references to the article summations for that week, noted what content might work well for the potential essay questions we had discussed. (All on my own PC, which cost about $3000 back then and barely had an operating system let alone AI. Word processor? Pshaw. It was a text editor.) But the process of doing that reorganization, that expansion, that linking to the readings we had done all helped me learn the content better, because one thing I learned in my educational psychology classes was every time you process information, you learn a little bit more.

But once again, I could probably put all of that into a ChatGPT prompt. In fact, those article summations and discussion questions could come from ChatGPT. But then I would miss the opportunity to learn from the process of organizing my notes and readings. And learn I did. I used things that I learned in that class throughout my career as an instructional designer, working with computer-based training and later e-learning.

Through a comedy of errors last spring, I ended up facilitating an online speech class for the back half of the semester. Very long story, which I will skip since this is too long already, but one thing I had to do was develop a rubric to help me grade their speeches. I did that by researching rubrics other colleges used, recommendations from some national speech organization, the scanty information in the course syllabus… And created a rubric I could use in Blackboard Learn to grade their speeches as they gave them. Again, I probably could have used ChatGPT and tell it to develop a rubric to grade speeches, using the rubric tool in Blackboard Learn It probably would have spit something out that may have actually worked…somewhat. But the process of developing that rubric helped me understand what went into a good speech, so I could do a better job facilitating a course about which I didn’t know a whole lot.

One of the speeches a student gave was actually against AI. Now I should explain that this was at a community college, and we had in our online courses a large number of working adult students with full-time jobs. He happened to be a CNC programmer. He told the story of one location in the company for which he worked that ended up trying to use AI to program their CNC machine. It ended up cutting out circles. Nothing but circles. Big circles, little circles, all it did was circles. So they sent him to that location to reprogram the machine so it would cut something other than circles. They had to pay for his travel, hotel, meals, overtime, etc., all because they decided to try to take a shortcut using AI.

So hey, if you want to cut out circles, go ahead and use AI. Let AI steal your potential to learn how to cut a rhombus. But if you want to be a better writer, a better learner, a better thinker, you gotta do the work yourself. I mean, I learned that 50 years ago when I was still in high school. Maybe Senator Schiff needs a lesson or two in doing the work. 

(I learned how to write decent conclusions, too.)