One of the greatest challenges of our age, if not the greatest, is choosing against convenience so as to maintain and develop capability, a challenge that has only become more pressing in the age of artificial intelligence (AI).
Surely, one of the groups on the very frontlines of this fight is students, and by extension, their teachers.
It would be all too easy for students to offload their mental effort onto, for example, ChatGPT. Something that, if numerous reports are to be believed, students at every educational level across the developed world are already doing. It is a development that educationalists and teachers – and parents first and foremost, obviously – should be expending no small amount of brainpower figuring out how to disrupt, and reverse where it has already taken root.
Which makes it all the more puzzling, then, that the State-funded support service for teachers, OIDE, is apparently recommending that rather than write their own poems or drama scripts as part of the English course, students ought to ask ChatGPT to generate those things for them, which they can then rewrite.
Such is the testimony of English teacher, Conor Murphy, who in a blogpost wrote that “the fight against the use of AI for creative tasks is officially over”.
Mr Murphy wrote:
“At a recent online Oide LCA English and Communications CPD, sorry, Professional Learning Experience (we no longer develop as professionals, we just experience, fleetingly, moment to moment), we were advised to get students to use ChatGPT to create poems for them, to suggest poems for them to read and to write drama scripts for them.
“One of their Key Assignments is to compose a poem, song or rap on a topic that means something to them. I presume this will be rewritten to ‘Ask AI to compose a poem, song or rap on a topic that means something to algorithms, and then rewrite it to make it appear you were involved in its creation.’”
What fresh hell is this? I do not say that lightly. Whatever about competent professionals figuring out how to streamline their work using AI-tools, the idea that the educational process ought to be streamlined, maximised, modernised, trimmed, or rationalised in such a manner not only risks sweeping the rug out from under young peoples’ feet, but indicates a profoundly impoverished understanding of education.
Not to mention a profoundly impoverished understanding of the human person.
Of course, I contacted OIDE requesting clarification on whether or not it advises English teachers to encourage the use of ChatGPT, or other AI models, for students, and to expound upon its approach to the use of AI in education. By the time of writing, no response was received, other than an automated one telling me they’ll get back to me in due course.
Should I receive a response following publication, this article will be updated to include it in full. But even without OIDE’s response to hand, we can consider what a mess of a suggestion the use of ChatGPT for creative writing is.
Creativity is a uniquely human activity. ChatGPT doesn’t create; it computes – on an absolutely massive scale. In asking it to generate a poem, or a drama script, a student is asking it to “repeatedly predict the most plausible next piece of text based on patterns it learned about language, literature, and storytelling” during training.
(That’s courtesy of ChatGPT, which was kind enough to generate an answer detailing the technical process behind its brute-forcing a poem, or script, upon my request.)
You’ll note that there’s something of a difference between the way that ChatGPT goes about ‘writing’ a poem then, and the way a human goes about it. A human seeks to put something into words, and searches the depths of their memories and experiences in order to do so. Books have been written about this, but the important point is that it is an ineffable, unquantifiable, activity. It is authentically human.
In recommending that students substitute in the use of ChatGPT, and that they simply riff off of that, educationalists would inadvertently deny students the opportunity to be authentically human, which really ought to be the goal of any education worth its salt. They would corral them into a mechanistic, reductive vision of the human person, whose only purpose is to streamline, maximise, modernise, trim, and rationalise.
Education has been moving in this direction for some time now, shifting from primary concern about a child’s exposure to the great corpus of human works, to a primary concern about getting the required points for college courses, which in turn are primarily concerned about making people employable.
Those considerations need not be mutually exclusive, but all too often, they unfortunately are. The vision of education as enabling human flourishing is fading, and the deeply disturbing suggestion that students employ ChatGPT to do their esteemed, human work is just the latest piece of evidence of that.