Since OpenAI released ChatGPT in November of 2022, countless companies have followed suit, releasing their own flavor of generative AI to the public marketing their tools as part of a grand public experiment.
The generative AI backlash is definitely upon us - judging from my anecdotal impression, two-thirds or more of the recent think pieces on AI skew negative. And with good reason. No one can keep up. With respect to education, Marc's point about the "frictionless" experience is exactly right. I am trying to find a way in to help my students use AI in their writing process but what comes back every time is they don't know enough about writing to use the tools effectively. It's a circular loop. Any AI generated feedback is simply too anodyne and generic to be of much help beyond the very basic contours of organization and sentence structure which we've had with grammarly for years. I've gotten better results with outlining, but writing should be hard, especially for novices. I'm not sure how "better AI" will be able to solve the issues Marc references ("it doesn’t know what the student did in class, how they contributed to the conversation, or how what they wrote added to those earlier insights") unless we have an AI transcript of every class discussion and even that would not capture all the nuances and interactions you have with students when discussing their work. In short, to get students to use AI effectively, we have to model it for them all while we are still figuring out how to do it ourselves. I still would like to see a place - either online or in person - for an AI symposium of experienced educators who are engaged in this process. As for this recent upgrade or tool which allows AI to be constantly "on", fortunately most of my students are not saavy or interested enough to use it. Yet.
Great examples and problems of the integration of "Help me write" in everyday online writing tasks for education. Thanks for walking us through this, Marc!
Gahds, headlines like this... oy. It's not even about slowness, which itself isn't something anyone can claim, but a practice that's useful sometimes, as is every point along the speed spectrum.
The post is good. Completely different from what the headline communicates.
I liked a lot about this post, but I particularly want to thank you for bringing up the privacy and FERPA issues around uploading student writing into AI. Although many students are willingly entering their own writing into AI programs, to me this doesn't justify the instructor doing so.
The imperative for speed in the corporate landscape using AI in knowledge work jobs seems purely tied to the fact getting more stuff done leads to more profits.
I am just having my students do in-class writing and other projects that are harder to do through AI. The AI is sometimes even making them get bad grades on this because they appear to ask the AI the prompt I give them ahead of time, and it gives them the wrong answer. Overall though, this is working well. It’s not ideal. I have papers based on specific discussions, etc. just to steer them away from the AI.
I find the subtle and not-so-subtle pressure to incorporate AI or teach them to use AI to be very annoying. First they can learn to write, then AI can possible be a useful tool even if at the moment it produces hackneyed and inelegant prose.
The generative AI backlash is definitely upon us - judging from my anecdotal impression, two-thirds or more of the recent think pieces on AI skew negative. And with good reason. No one can keep up. With respect to education, Marc's point about the "frictionless" experience is exactly right. I am trying to find a way in to help my students use AI in their writing process but what comes back every time is they don't know enough about writing to use the tools effectively. It's a circular loop. Any AI generated feedback is simply too anodyne and generic to be of much help beyond the very basic contours of organization and sentence structure which we've had with grammarly for years. I've gotten better results with outlining, but writing should be hard, especially for novices. I'm not sure how "better AI" will be able to solve the issues Marc references ("it doesn’t know what the student did in class, how they contributed to the conversation, or how what they wrote added to those earlier insights") unless we have an AI transcript of every class discussion and even that would not capture all the nuances and interactions you have with students when discussing their work. In short, to get students to use AI effectively, we have to model it for them all while we are still figuring out how to do it ourselves. I still would like to see a place - either online or in person - for an AI symposium of experienced educators who are engaged in this process. As for this recent upgrade or tool which allows AI to be constantly "on", fortunately most of my students are not saavy or interested enough to use it. Yet.
I love your idea of reclaiming slowness! I’ve tried to do something similar in my classroom with deeper thinking.
https://open.substack.com/pub/adrianneibauer/p/philosophia?r=gtvg8&utm_medium=ios
Great examples and problems of the integration of "Help me write" in everyday online writing tasks for education. Thanks for walking us through this, Marc!
Gahds, headlines like this... oy. It's not even about slowness, which itself isn't something anyone can claim, but a practice that's useful sometimes, as is every point along the speed spectrum.
The post is good. Completely different from what the headline communicates.
I liked a lot about this post, but I particularly want to thank you for bringing up the privacy and FERPA issues around uploading student writing into AI. Although many students are willingly entering their own writing into AI programs, to me this doesn't justify the instructor doing so.
You nailed it 🙌
Very interesting perspective from the classroom.
The imperative for speed in the corporate landscape using AI in knowledge work jobs seems purely tied to the fact getting more stuff done leads to more profits.
I am just having my students do in-class writing and other projects that are harder to do through AI. The AI is sometimes even making them get bad grades on this because they appear to ask the AI the prompt I give them ahead of time, and it gives them the wrong answer. Overall though, this is working well. It’s not ideal. I have papers based on specific discussions, etc. just to steer them away from the AI.
I find the subtle and not-so-subtle pressure to incorporate AI or teach them to use AI to be very annoying. First they can learn to write, then AI can possible be a useful tool even if at the moment it produces hackneyed and inelegant prose.