GREAT POST - raising several issues that I haven’t read about before!!
Such a different take to the laziness view that many (maybe half) teachers seem to have - while the other half seem to “stick their heads in the sand”…
This is a nice statement of where we definitely find ourselves. Last August I wrote a post about students who don't feel like there's any point in knowing things when GPT knows it all, and think I made a strong argument that knowing something is different from knowing where to find the information, but it definitely begged the question of what the value of knowing something really is now. I hope that ten years from now we look back and say, ha ha, the answer was simple and we were stupid for not seeing it.
You write, “If a student already feels unconfident in their abilities, terrified of the blank page, then the anxiety of machine-generated ‘perfection’ must be a staggering psychological barrier that some students likely don’t see the point in confronting or doing much of anything as a result.”
I know an ADHD student similar to Drew who felt that way even before the advent of AI. Perfectionism can be crippling.
I don't know, it's been many decades since any human could do arithmetic better than a calculator and that doesn't seem to have caused a crisis of confidence in elementary math education. There's basically two options:
1. AI is extremely good at gaming the systems we use for assessing human performance but poor at producing real value. Bluebooks it is.
2. AI is better than humans are producing value and will rapidly obsolete most knowledge work. There is indeed no more point to higher education.
If 2 is really the answer, students should be a lot less consumed by ennui and a lot more worried about wasting their college tuition when they should be doing a plumbing apprenticeship. But my fear is that AI hype has succeeded in making a lot of people think we are on trajectory 2 while all the objective economic evidence to date says we are on trajectory 1. The kids LLMing through college are going to be totally unable to pass an in-person interview (and at least in my group, we've agreed we will only hire candidates after on-site interviews now). There's a tragedy in the making here.
I do faculty development and instructional design work as my full time job, and am currently in my PhD program (researching supporting faculty with invisible disabilities like neurodivergence). I also used to teach middle school kids, my niche skill being supporting kids that hate school and reading. Very ND myself… long way of saying I’m at the intersection of a lot of what you discussed here, and I actually want to applaud Drew here. Having a very real crisis of purpose, and choosing to not engage in the parts that don’t add meaning for him, but engaging in the parts that do, sounds like a pretty advanced sense of self, all things considered. To not fall to the pressure to perform based on other people’s expectations can be a skill that can be harnessed to what does give him purpose.
I think if more instructors wrestled with this purposeless feeling out in the open, more students would feel less shame about it, and able to channel it into a new purpose for themselves. As it is, the combo of cost of school, gpa requirements, often harsh grading that disincentivizes risk and strategic engagement all mixes together to disempower many students from feeling like they have any mental space to grapple with their purpose for any amount of time before there are life altering consequences.
Marie, what you're saying here resonates with me. I teach at a large open-enrollment college, and I think that Marc's post directly addresses the real challenge many students face (which you so nicely articulate in your comment). The question is about the purpose of learning, of college, of doing brain work. I am prepping for a presentation to high school teachers this summer about how to address genAI and want to keep these questions at the center of our concerns.
I wondered why a priest would even consider using AI, as homilies are an essential part of the being a parish priest.
But I've noticed lately that even people who were mostly uninterested in AI are beginning to feel impelled to use it, even in what I'd consider a 'ask google' type way. For instance, a friend recently presented a bursary award. She had easily done this task in previous years. But, this time, she asked AI to help create her simple speech. When she read it- I was in attendance- it was trite, dull, devoid of her human flair and voice.
I am troubled.
Have we reached a point where people feel they must AI for assistance with a task they easily completed before, especially one in their personal lives? I am trouble that people feel an "ought", that AI be integrated into all that they previously did easily, with AI.
The shift is manipulative, to make a culture where AI matters.
It is humanity that matters.
We are forming a culture manipulated to believe that AI Must be involved in all areas of our lives, that AI is BETTER than being a human; that AI is where we turn first. That AI matters.
AI is hollowing out our relationship with Our Self, and as you said, it demonstrates " just how big a challenge this technology poses to purpose and meaning-making, " and I'd add, to just being a human.
The framing in the title "..stop believing their work matter" - I wonder if that's accurate. I wonder if they ever started believing it mattered.
I had a previous draft of this, but clicked something and lost it, so am trying again. I was exploring my concern that so much of our assessment models are performative in nature, and if we genuinely don't value the performance, than why would we do the work? The Arts generally don't have this issue, there is huge pride, personal investment, etc in their work, but essay writing? Nah, I can see that for many students it's not something with which they've developed a strong relationship. They haven't built a value connection with it.
I learned a number of years ago that "We do not think in order to write, we write in order to think". And I value thinking extremely highly, so for me, though I am a somewhat reluctant writer, I do understand the power of words and I value the act of thinking, so I can value the task and the outcome. But I have also learned the limitations of using AI to write. Too much, and I lose any connection with the words. I never copy-paste, for example, I always develop them elsewhere and then I will bring the AI contribution in manually, through my own typing. I learned many years ago, for example, that I struggled to write words I did not understand. So I could take notes during a lecture, writing things down as fast as possible, but when it came to studying, I often did this by re-writing them. I would get stuck and recognise I wasn't understanding something, and couldn't move on until I had re-grasped the thread, or learned the concept.
These are productive struggles I've learned to accept, to look for even, because I know their value. But how hard is that for young people, especially those who have grown in a world where AI is at their fingertips. If they've lived in a disconnected, performative output world which has focused on the extrinsic reward, not the intrinsic growth, and thus they have not developed a value-relationship with their output, then - why would they?
I can totally understand Drew - in that article. He was learning, he was engaged, he was having a great time. He was thinking. But he had not learned the personal value of writing, and so - why would he write. And he was probably also at a stage where he no longer valued the "grade" or whatever would arise from doing such work.
This is not a weakness on Drew's side, it is a criticism of our approaches to teaching that have focused on the output, and not on the process.
Thank you for this astute post that synthesizes so many critical aspects of this issue. Yes, I think that framing the challenge as a question of purpose is incredibly productive because it allows us to see why students and faculty feel compelled to perhaps use genAI programs, or why these products directly confront an educational landscape and its purpose: the purpose of learning, the purpose of getting a job, the purpose of any mental effort, the purpose of integrating of so many technologies that are external to that student-teacher dyad, and the purpose of using tools that promises to alleviate real material constraints in which we all live and work. I'm prepping for an AI workshop this summer with high school teachers who teach my college's first-year writing course, and I want to reference your post as a starting point.
By fostering authentic connections, encouraging dialogue about AI’s role, and reaffirming the intrinsic value of human creativity and judgment, we can ensure that education remains an option not just available to students, but truly worth choosing.
Education is fundamentally an act of human communication. I hate the sense of disconnection I have 'teaching' online - particularly when there is no response - but if the entire experience is mediated by AI then I'm out.
When mobile phones first showed up I thought it was a fad - status symbol for narcissistic finance bros. Then it seemed like everyone was walking around talking to themselves. Now we have a mix of that with a lot of folks who seem to think nothing of stopping their cart in the middle of the shopping aisle to text - they have no sense that anyone is sharing the physical space with them. Next, I'm very much afraid we will find ourselves in a world full of people wearing smart glasses and interacting only with their AI agents, delegating all those workaday communications with friends and family and saving So Much Time!
What an insightful piece. Marshall McLuhan (who seems increasingly relevant these days) wrote that technology redefines our notions (I.e. think of how Facebook redefined the word “friend”). I wonder if AI has redefined the concept of “student,” “assignment,” and “work” to the point that students are unsure of how to properly utilize AI to complete their assignments.
GREAT POST - raising several issues that I haven’t read about before!!
Such a different take to the laziness view that many (maybe half) teachers seem to have - while the other half seem to “stick their heads in the sand”…
THANK YOU SO MUCH! 👍♥️
Very nicely said
This is a nice statement of where we definitely find ourselves. Last August I wrote a post about students who don't feel like there's any point in knowing things when GPT knows it all, and think I made a strong argument that knowing something is different from knowing where to find the information, but it definitely begged the question of what the value of knowing something really is now. I hope that ten years from now we look back and say, ha ha, the answer was simple and we were stupid for not seeing it.
https://davidgibsonsoc.substack.com/p/whats-in-your-consciousness?r=20r2jt&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Good thoughts here.
You write, “If a student already feels unconfident in their abilities, terrified of the blank page, then the anxiety of machine-generated ‘perfection’ must be a staggering psychological barrier that some students likely don’t see the point in confronting or doing much of anything as a result.”
I know an ADHD student similar to Drew who felt that way even before the advent of AI. Perfectionism can be crippling.
I don't know, it's been many decades since any human could do arithmetic better than a calculator and that doesn't seem to have caused a crisis of confidence in elementary math education. There's basically two options:
1. AI is extremely good at gaming the systems we use for assessing human performance but poor at producing real value. Bluebooks it is.
2. AI is better than humans are producing value and will rapidly obsolete most knowledge work. There is indeed no more point to higher education.
If 2 is really the answer, students should be a lot less consumed by ennui and a lot more worried about wasting their college tuition when they should be doing a plumbing apprenticeship. But my fear is that AI hype has succeeded in making a lot of people think we are on trajectory 2 while all the objective economic evidence to date says we are on trajectory 1. The kids LLMing through college are going to be totally unable to pass an in-person interview (and at least in my group, we've agreed we will only hire candidates after on-site interviews now). There's a tragedy in the making here.
I do faculty development and instructional design work as my full time job, and am currently in my PhD program (researching supporting faculty with invisible disabilities like neurodivergence). I also used to teach middle school kids, my niche skill being supporting kids that hate school and reading. Very ND myself… long way of saying I’m at the intersection of a lot of what you discussed here, and I actually want to applaud Drew here. Having a very real crisis of purpose, and choosing to not engage in the parts that don’t add meaning for him, but engaging in the parts that do, sounds like a pretty advanced sense of self, all things considered. To not fall to the pressure to perform based on other people’s expectations can be a skill that can be harnessed to what does give him purpose.
I think if more instructors wrestled with this purposeless feeling out in the open, more students would feel less shame about it, and able to channel it into a new purpose for themselves. As it is, the combo of cost of school, gpa requirements, often harsh grading that disincentivizes risk and strategic engagement all mixes together to disempower many students from feeling like they have any mental space to grapple with their purpose for any amount of time before there are life altering consequences.
Marie, what you're saying here resonates with me. I teach at a large open-enrollment college, and I think that Marc's post directly addresses the real challenge many students face (which you so nicely articulate in your comment). The question is about the purpose of learning, of college, of doing brain work. I am prepping for a presentation to high school teachers this summer about how to address genAI and want to keep these questions at the center of our concerns.
I wondered why a priest would even consider using AI, as homilies are an essential part of the being a parish priest.
But I've noticed lately that even people who were mostly uninterested in AI are beginning to feel impelled to use it, even in what I'd consider a 'ask google' type way. For instance, a friend recently presented a bursary award. She had easily done this task in previous years. But, this time, she asked AI to help create her simple speech. When she read it- I was in attendance- it was trite, dull, devoid of her human flair and voice.
I am troubled.
Have we reached a point where people feel they must AI for assistance with a task they easily completed before, especially one in their personal lives? I am trouble that people feel an "ought", that AI be integrated into all that they previously did easily, with AI.
The shift is manipulative, to make a culture where AI matters.
It is humanity that matters.
We are forming a culture manipulated to believe that AI Must be involved in all areas of our lives, that AI is BETTER than being a human; that AI is where we turn first. That AI matters.
AI is hollowing out our relationship with Our Self, and as you said, it demonstrates " just how big a challenge this technology poses to purpose and meaning-making, " and I'd add, to just being a human.
This post is just about blaming AI with no justification. There have been problems with motivation for years prior to AI existing.
Precious insights here. 5 years out of college and working in tech - asking similar questions along the lines of this tension.
Thought provoking. Also quite frightening.
The framing in the title "..stop believing their work matter" - I wonder if that's accurate. I wonder if they ever started believing it mattered.
I had a previous draft of this, but clicked something and lost it, so am trying again. I was exploring my concern that so much of our assessment models are performative in nature, and if we genuinely don't value the performance, than why would we do the work? The Arts generally don't have this issue, there is huge pride, personal investment, etc in their work, but essay writing? Nah, I can see that for many students it's not something with which they've developed a strong relationship. They haven't built a value connection with it.
I learned a number of years ago that "We do not think in order to write, we write in order to think". And I value thinking extremely highly, so for me, though I am a somewhat reluctant writer, I do understand the power of words and I value the act of thinking, so I can value the task and the outcome. But I have also learned the limitations of using AI to write. Too much, and I lose any connection with the words. I never copy-paste, for example, I always develop them elsewhere and then I will bring the AI contribution in manually, through my own typing. I learned many years ago, for example, that I struggled to write words I did not understand. So I could take notes during a lecture, writing things down as fast as possible, but when it came to studying, I often did this by re-writing them. I would get stuck and recognise I wasn't understanding something, and couldn't move on until I had re-grasped the thread, or learned the concept.
These are productive struggles I've learned to accept, to look for even, because I know their value. But how hard is that for young people, especially those who have grown in a world where AI is at their fingertips. If they've lived in a disconnected, performative output world which has focused on the extrinsic reward, not the intrinsic growth, and thus they have not developed a value-relationship with their output, then - why would they?
I can totally understand Drew - in that article. He was learning, he was engaged, he was having a great time. He was thinking. But he had not learned the personal value of writing, and so - why would he write. And he was probably also at a stage where he no longer valued the "grade" or whatever would arise from doing such work.
This is not a weakness on Drew's side, it is a criticism of our approaches to teaching that have focused on the output, and not on the process.
Thank you for this astute post that synthesizes so many critical aspects of this issue. Yes, I think that framing the challenge as a question of purpose is incredibly productive because it allows us to see why students and faculty feel compelled to perhaps use genAI programs, or why these products directly confront an educational landscape and its purpose: the purpose of learning, the purpose of getting a job, the purpose of any mental effort, the purpose of integrating of so many technologies that are external to that student-teacher dyad, and the purpose of using tools that promises to alleviate real material constraints in which we all live and work. I'm prepping for an AI workshop this summer with high school teachers who teach my college's first-year writing course, and I want to reference your post as a starting point.
By fostering authentic connections, encouraging dialogue about AI’s role, and reaffirming the intrinsic value of human creativity and judgment, we can ensure that education remains an option not just available to students, but truly worth choosing.
> When a machine can now mimic the work of a human being, many of us, especially students, must be asking what the point is anymore.
"It's the same picture", to quote the meme.
Education is fundamentally an act of human communication. I hate the sense of disconnection I have 'teaching' online - particularly when there is no response - but if the entire experience is mediated by AI then I'm out.
When mobile phones first showed up I thought it was a fad - status symbol for narcissistic finance bros. Then it seemed like everyone was walking around talking to themselves. Now we have a mix of that with a lot of folks who seem to think nothing of stopping their cart in the middle of the shopping aisle to text - they have no sense that anyone is sharing the physical space with them. Next, I'm very much afraid we will find ourselves in a world full of people wearing smart glasses and interacting only with their AI agents, delegating all those workaday communications with friends and family and saving So Much Time!
What an insightful piece. Marshall McLuhan (who seems increasingly relevant these days) wrote that technology redefines our notions (I.e. think of how Facebook redefined the word “friend”). I wonder if AI has redefined the concept of “student,” “assignment,” and “work” to the point that students are unsure of how to properly utilize AI to complete their assignments.