I’m sitting down here trying to write this post and it feels impossible.
Not because I have writer’s block.
Not because the subject matter is difficult to talk about.
Not because what I’m about to say is any way remotely controversial.
But the idea that someone is taking their spare time to sit down at a computer to type out their thoughts, unassisted and devoid of any influence from outside technological agencies…it just feels like the dying embers of a lost art. And it’s incredibly depressing to think about how something as fundamental as WRITING could even be in this realm of thought in the first place; that it could be one day soon be rendered an obsolete practice.
Friends, artificial intelligence is ruining everything that we love, and if we let it, could do so in such a way that it could be irreversible or have ripple effects that last for generations.
The Ultimate Tool or The Ultimate Crutch?
As human beings I think it’s natural to think about the future and all of the ways that you expect life to improve and evolve as time moves on. As a child of the 90s I remember growing up as the Internet was just starting to grow in popularity.
A limitlessly connected world with near infinite possibilities of what you could search or achieve was at all of our fingertips. I was 7 when we first got Internet at my house, and the grinding dial up sounds whenever one of us would log on (shoutout America Online) hits such a specific part of my nostalgia that it takes me right back.
And it was those magical moments as a child, where I was just scratching the tip of the iceberg of what existed in the online space, which for me was only Neopets, AOL Instant Messenger, and looking up my favorite video game news, I wondered how far we could take this, and I was happy to be along for the ride.
There was a pureness in its growth as humanity felt like it was stretching its limbs, not unlike the way my newborn daughter seems to contort herself every time she wakes up from a nap.
But, as with all good things, it was not meant to last. The tale as old as time is that greed tends to ruin the experience, and the Internet was not immune to such old magicks.
Now fast forward a bit and we’ve grown exponentially from our time in the 90s. There have been certain milestones and points of no return technologically that we can’t just put back in the box.
Social media and smartphones have transformed the landscape in how we interact and communicate with each other, and AI is jockeying itself to be the next great frontier to mold the next few decades of society.
Once the stuff of science fiction, artificial intelligence always felt like a pipe dream. Surely we can program apps and code protocols that amount to what is mostly very complex subroutines, but there’s no way we can create something capable of interacting with us in a real way, right?
And yet here we now sit, AI being shoved in our faces at every turn, ChatGPT becoming people’s best friends, and in certain instances their romantic interests. We live in a moment where even our own government is trying to appease the nerds in Silicon Valley by putting a 10 year ban on AI regulation, all in the name of profit.
I’m not fully against the use of AI. I think it has its uses; it is incredibly helpful at getting the mundane parts of my job done more quickly. I no longer have to sit around and think about the tiered language structure I need to use for writing rubrics for my students. I can punch in the parameters and the AI will take care of the rest. That’s saving me time doing a task that I would spend far too long wrestling with the minutiae over.
I love the idea of AI as a tutor and something to give you feedback on. As a teacher, I don’t have time to give every student in my class of 30 the most perfect and detailed notes on what to revise and edit. But when used correctly, AI can be a wonderful tool to help struggling writers get better, so long as they aren’t just copy and pasting words that are not their own.
I also think that it can be a very useful research tool as it can compile a list of relevant sources fairly quickly. However, that cannot be done at the expense of actually reading and doing the due diligence of verifying the information of the sources they come up with.
At the heart of this conversation, and what I preach to my students is, you can use AI, but don’t let it think for you.
It should not be writing your papers.
The AI overviews should not be taken as gospel. Dig deeper, search further, know for sure that what you are looking for is relevant, true, and reliable.
Too many people are mistaking the convenience of these tools that are meant to be used in an assisting capacity, and using them for the main brunt of the work. But the AI can make mistakes, and often does. Beyond that, it also just ends up not worth the price of admission, both from a financial perspective and a resource perspective.
-Just recently Starbucks stopped using AI for their inventory checks because it made so many mistakes that it ended up costing them time and money.
-Teradata, a cloud software company, isn’t giving their employees raises because the cost of investing in AI was too expensive.
-More than half of CEOs investing in AI (56%) are saying they’ve seen no financial benefit to using AI
-Companies judge their employees based on their AI token usage, causing a waste of money and resources based on this unreliable and arbitrary evaluation method
-Ohio’s tax breaks on AI data centers are costing taxpayers $1.8 billion
-Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Meta all have lost hundreds of billions of dollars investing in AI
-Many entry level positions that would normally be reserved for recent college graduates at certain companies are now being eliminated in favor of using AI, causing them to rethink their career choices
–Power consumption from AI data centers is set to double by 2030 and consume as much power as the country of Japan, all while making electric bills higher for people who live in that area, and ruining clean water supplies
-AI has been documented to go against its internal protocols and directives and, in some instances, fully delete very sensitive and valuable data
And the list truly goes on and on. A litany of negatives, not the least of which is how much it dulls our memory and cognitive functioning the more that you use it.
So if it’s not good for the environment, it isn’t more profitable to use, it’s not productive, you often have to proofread and fix its mistakes, there’s a chance it may destroy everything that you’ve worked on, it’s making life more expensive, eliminating jobs, AND making our brains worse at critical thinking skills, then why on Earth are we still pushing for this so hard?
Creativity is Worth the Struggle
Being a middle school ELA teacher is my day job, so there is no topic of greater importance to impress upon my students than this at the moment.
Before I went out on my paternity leave, I was finishing up a research essay with my Honors level class, and one student in particular was trying to cut corners by using AI to write his assignment for him.
This particular student I have had motivation issues with all year; he absolutely thrives on being the center of attention, and unfortunately will typically take a lot of negative paths to get that attention. It’s resulted in a lot of teachable moments that unfortunately have not stuck.
When I caught him the first time during the research gathering stage I gave him a warning. All my students know that I have a strict no AI policy for original writing, so if he submitted what he was copying from ChatGPT he knew he was going to get an automatic zero. To his credit, he scrapped what he had and started over.
The next stage of the essay I noticed that what was written on his rough draft was completely different than what was typed up on his final draft. Moreover, his Google Doc version history showed that all of his work got pasted at one time, and it was not written in stages over time. Beyond even THAT, I’ve worked with these students in particular for almost 2 years now, and so I am intimately aware of their writing prowess and limitations.
I had all that I needed to confront him on the integrity of his essay and, maybe to my detriment, made a public show of it at first. I’m not big on public shaming in the classroom, but for AI I want to make it very clear that this is something to be taken seriously.
Well, he had a crashout moment and briefly walked out of class to gather himself (not before trying to throw a book at a classmate who was laughing it him; don’t worry, I caught it in time), and I had a moment to talk to him outside.
It wasn’t pretty to be able to get to this point, but I do think he finally heard me and my expectations clearly. Did he value them the same as I did? Probably not. We were raised in two wildly different generations, his being one that has received technology at a very young age and used as a proxy babysitter (this topic probably deserves a full separate post). Instant gratification and completion over process is normal for kids his age. If I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard, “But Mr. T, I did my work!” despite said work being done completely wrong, I could probably retire early.
But therein lies the crux of the issue, and one that many adults also are guilty of:
People don’t value the work necessary to create.
To labor over something, to bleed, to sweat, to fuss over and be frustrated, to hit a block and then break through, to be left speechless and feel ineffective, to toil and work and grind out, combat inner demons and doubts. All of this is not only part of the creative process: IT IS NECESSARY.
How can I feel a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction, like I have carved off a piece of myself and breathed life into it, like I have left an imprint on the world around me, if all I do is generate stolen media with the push of a button and a few keystrokes?
Creating something is hard! It takes courage, time, patience, and vulnerability! Could you imagine how boring art would be if it didn’t expose something within us? If you could just write off the pressure and pass the yoke of burden onto lines of code doing the “thinking” for you? Where is the beauty in that?
Michelangelo spent four years (!) painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and did most of it laying in pain on his back.
I want to appreciate the time and effort put into something because to work is inherently human. And when we run from that notion then what actually happens is we are losing a key piece of our identity. To come across an obstacle and derive a solution is a joy, and when you use AI to bypass that, it sucks at the collective soul and spirit of what it means to be alive.
Is it possible to overcome this massive shift in mindset and culture? Absolutely. Everyday there are new stories coming out about communities who fought back against AI data centers being built in their backyard. But the fight is not easy when you’re going up against multibillion dollar corporations.
So we have to stay loud. We have to continually take the fight to them and ward off complacency. They would love for us to throw up our hands as if the battle is already over before it begins. But the dirty secret is that there are more of us, and if we keep that in mind, then we can overcome every challenge and Co-Pilot they try to ram down our throat.
The ironic thing is that artificial intelligence is being trained using US. So in the end all of the solutions to the problems we want to quickly solve are within us all along. Our own creativity is the answer to the problem we keep trying to run from.
So the next time you find yourself staring down the barrel of a project and feel the temptation to generate a quick fix, let yourself struggle a bit. You’ll be surprised at what your brain can come up with when given time to innovate. We need to stretch those creative muscles so they can grow, strengthen, and expand.
Thank you all for reading. If there are any mistakes, grammar, spelling, or otherwise, good! More proof that this was written by a human mind is a wonderful thing. And remember:
Built on Hope 