A few words to my students about AI. And the fate of culture...

To my students. A few words about AI. And the fate of culture.

I will not be commenting on this first round of responses. I will say, however, that I’ve observed clear signs of students using AI to produce their responses. The same key phrases being used across multiple papers etc. This is dismaying. It makes me wonder why some of are you even enrolled in university or in my class. It makes me wonder why I even teach frankly.

AI has produced a crisis of faith for university lecturers, professors, deans, etc. No one knows how to respond – how to stem the tide. In my view, the tide cannot be stemmed. We have to figure out how to work with AI in a way that does not compromise academic integrity.

Integrity. Yes. The gold standard shibboleth that seems to have become debased. Or maybe just undergoing a sea-change.

I could go on about how using AI to write papers is disrespectful, not only of me, but of the entire idea of higher ed. I could say things like: You’re supposed to be learning how to think. To develop cognitive skills and engage in critical thinking.

I could chide you – like that would do anything. Beside no one likes being chided.

But maybe that’s not the thing here.

Many of you are committed to doing honest work and it shows. I’m grateful for it. Some of you are just looking for an easy work around, checking a box and moving on. You all seem to be bright and ambitious but are probably anxious about your futures. AI gives you a edge. Cuts you some slack. I get that. The future is a scary place.

Since I can’t prove beyond a reasonable doubt that cheating is going on – since the very meaning of cheating seems to be shifting -- and since the university has declined to establish any standards in this matter -- I will not be doing anything about this.

The university, as usual, leads from behind – no one in Admin – the chairs, the deans, etc, will formulate a coherent policy for dealing with AI. Instead it falls on depts and individual instructors to deal with it. My program is meeting soon to discuss this issue. I don’t expect anything substantive to emerge from that. Just some vague consensus, the usual hand wringing and ineffective or laborious strategies.

I suppose this all comes down to some generational shift/fault line that I’m too antiquated to grasp. AI is just a tool, like any other tool, right? Why shouldn’t you use it? Your real focus is on Cell Biology or Law or whatever. You need every advantage you can get to succeed here. And I want you to succeed. But using AI may result in actually under preparing you for the job market.

The great linguist and political commentator Noam Chomsky called ChatGPT a plagiarizing tool. Well, yes. So when one uses it one is not doing original work. Not doing the grunt work. The thing is: it’s ALL grunt work. That’s how you grow a brain. But maybe not anymore – not in the traditional way.

There are two registers here and they are in conflict: one is ethical. The prohibition against cheating. The other is technological: each new development or revolution in data processing and communications expands our reach and changes the meaning of what it means to be a baseline human. As someone who’s read SF since grade school, I get that and embrace it. The transformative potentialities of new tech – to expand our minds and our reach.

Maybe AI represents the emergence of some new hybrid form of intelligence. Something truly posthuman. It’s too early to tell and I am not smart enough to say. Uncharted waters.

The scholar Katherine Hayles writes about the interface/evolution of the human mind in her groundbreaking book: How We Became Posthuman (1999). In it she argues that humanity has always been posthuman, since the first use of tools – prosthetic extensions of the human sensorium. She charts the growth of cybernetics as a discipline at MIT and how ideas about feedback systems (how the output becomes the input etc) changes the very notion of our subjectivity.

New info tech always changes the game. Plato in the Phaedrus has a fable about how the invention of writing will have a deleterious effect on memory. When the printing press was invented it led to the Reformation and that led to the Thirty Years War. Sort of. The telegraph. Telephone. Radio. The internet. All of these dazzling forms of communication, by which time conquers space as Marx wrote, by which the world becomes ever more compressed – the On Time/next day delivery world. changed the game. This tech changed how we think about the meaning of being human.

As Hayles argues, consciousness can no longer be conceived of as centralized in one embodied location; it exists and flows in distributed networks. This is the underlying architectural concept of the internet.

Now comes AI. Is it a only a difference in degree? Or a difference in kind?

This is all by way of my trying to articulate what I consider to be the threat but also the promise of AI to the Humanities. End of the day I’m just a guy who writes about poetry. I’m punching above my weight here.

So pay this screed no heed. I’ve had too much coffee this morning and am just listening to the Brandenberg Concertos for like the 5000th time. They seem to hold up.

I know you are all trying to do your best and that you’re overburdened because college is hard – it’s supposed to be. So use AI all you want. I can’t stop you. I’m not sure I want to even. Anyway, the genie is out of the bottle.

And after all, this class is just a requirement. Another box to check. Another brick in the wall. In the big picture not all that important though Humanities profs like myself like to yammer on about rigor. And value. Which I do believe in.

But things are changing. One must adapt.

One thing that does not change? The brilliance of Hammett and Chandler. They do not suck. So enjoy.