AI

The Muse

One of the assumptions those who say this is the end of high school English make about students is that if students can find an end around doing the actual work of school, they will definitely take it.

What does it say about what we ask students to do in school that we assume they will do whatever they can to avoid it?

John Warner • ChatGPT Can't Kill Anything Worth Preserving

Many are wailing that this technology spells “the end of high school English,” meaning those classes where you read some books and then write some pro forma essays that show you sort of read the books, or at least the Spark Notes, or at least took the time to go to Chegg or Course Hero and grab someone else’s essay, where you changed a few words to... See more

John Warner • ChatGPT Can't Kill Anything Worth Preserving

Deep down, this is a question about what we value, in what we read, what we write, and unfortunately, we have attached a set of values to student writing that are disconnected from anything we actually value about what we read, and what we write.

Along with many others, I’ve been shouting about these problems for years, often into what felt like a... See more

John Warner • ChatGPT Can't Kill Anything Worth Preserving

You can no longer make students do the reading or the writing. So what’s left? Only this: give them work they want to do. And help them want to do it. What, again, is education? The non-coercive rearranging of desire.

Within five years, it will make little sense for scholars of history to keep producing monographs in the traditional mold—nobody will... See more

D. Graham Burnett • Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence? | the New Yorker

The best, and perhaps the only, way out of AI’s college takeover would be to embark on a redesign of classroom practice. But with so many other things to worry about, who has the time? In this way, professors face the same challenge as their students in the year ahead: A college education will be what they make of it too. At some point, everyone on... See more

Ian Bogost • This Year Will Be the Turning Point for AI College

“I would think to myself, What the hell am I doing, sitting watching this professor give the same lecture that he has given every year for the last 30 years? ” But he knew the answer even then: He was there to subsidize that professor’s research.

Ian Bogost • This Year Will Be the Turning Point for AI College

Again, example of misplaced motivation caused by system incentives. It also affects the professors.

For Lieber, AI’s allure seems more about the promise of achievement than efficiency. As with most students who are accepted to and graduate from an elite university, he and his classmates have been striving their whole life. As Lieber put it, if a course won’t have “a tangible impact on my ability to get a good job,” then “it’s not worth putting a... See more

Ian Bogost • This Year Will Be the Turning Point for AI College

misplaced motivation caused by societal incentives and pressures. To succeed or even survive, the bar is so high. When assignments/classes feel arbitrary, a means to an end, an obstacle to overcome or an obligatory box to check, there is every incentive to expedite the process of learning and none to engage with it.

As a college student, he told me, he has mostly inhabited a world with ChatGPT. For those in his position, the many moral questions that AI provokes—for example, whether it is exploitative, or anti-intellectual, or ecologically unsound—take a back seat to the simple truth of its utility. Lieber characterized the matter as pragmatic above all else:... See more

Ian Bogost • This Year Will Be the Turning Point for AI College

the corrupting power of convenience

The technology is no longer just a curiosity or a way to cheat; it is a habit, as ubiquitous on campus as eating processed foods or scrolling social media. In the coming fall semester, this new reality will be undeniable. Higher education has been changed forever in the span of a single undergraduate career.