What is your personal relationship to AI? How do the arguments of Ferlazzo or Galland & Rettinger feel to you? Do they resonate with you? Alienate you? Scare you? Excite you?
NOTE: I used ChatGPT (purely for irony) to create these memes. I asked ChatGPT to "Make a meme based on this:" and then I copied in both the questions that were asked and my entire response. It gave me many memes all on the same photo, I then took snipits of the smaller memes to post into my post. Look at the full conversation (and the full mega-meme) here
Me:"it starts with an n" " it means to disagree with"
AI: "negate"
Me: "yes!"
AI also helped me A LOT with planning a science curriculum when we were given NO CURRICULUM AND NO MATERIALS. I've used the generative picture part of AI to design a living room space with specific furniture given specific dimensions, to help my sister decide if she wanted to get her nose pierced or not and more. I've used AI to help find academic peer reviewed sources (shout out Perplexity) and rebrand an entire document when TFA decided to change their branding (shout out Claude).
Despite my personal use, I also see the other side-- the robots are going to take over the world, I'm wrecking the Earth because of how much water ChatGPT needs to cool down its servers after each question, it takes away the thinking job of people, etc. perspective of the debate. One thing that really stuck out to me was Feriazzo said about AI being a modern tool: "
“Ethically,” he said, “I just don’t think I ever could use it. It doesn’t seem fair.”
I sighed. “Picture yourself when everyone is switching from the wooden plow to the steel.
You say, ‘I just don’t think I can use this new tool that will save me hours of grunt work. It
doesn’t seem fair.’”
I've heard a lot that AI is coming our way, whether or not we want it to, and that it'll simply be easier for us to be with it than against it (sounds a lot like a zombie apocalypse if you ask me) but I've been playing around with /using AI as both a toy and a tool.
As an educator, I also have to think about AI and my students, I'd rather teach them responsible ways to use AI rather than them being unsafe with it. This leads me to important arguments by Galland and Rettinger, especially regarding motivation and the story of the student named John who retook a class that he previously did not so well on. The authors describe that John had a lot of intrinsic motivation, motivational orientation, mastery goals, that pushed him to want to take the class. The piece itself talks a lot about "cheating", why students would do it and what the implications of it are. One thing that I'm wondering is how the use and normalization of AI subtracts from productive struggle, therefore also reducing the satisfaction of working through it, working through the learning pit. I worry about how the use of AI, especially with young people, give students an "out" to be able to not just reduce but eliminate all struggle. When we don't have the dopamine hit of working something out, I can see that directly relating to the decrease of intrinsic motivation for students. How do I negotiate the space between understanding and knowing students have AI at their fingertips and also feeling very passionately that they need to be able to do it alone first (the same reason that we need to know how to do basic arithmetic before we are able to use calculators) ? I'm nervous about what AI means for us both as a humanity and as educators...
Shout out to Stella (yes, the one in our class) for being on TFA's billboard !
Hi Lexi! Thanks for the thoughtful post! I really like how you have leveraged AI to help you with planning in your class. It sounds like you have the relationship tech philosophers hope professionals have, the one that looks like AI not doing the job for you but helping you do it better. AND you raise some good concerns, especially the environmental concern. For every inquiry, however small, there is a reciprocal physical impact somewhere that we don't see. This has been weighing on me lately, and I'm not sure how to reconcile these feelings. My students have also brought up the same concerns about AI. They say, "You're killing the polar bears!" Also, you mention this inevitability of new technology adaption. This I think is sort of an unexamined social "truth." We seem to take it for granted that new tech will be integrated and mainstream. "No" doesn't seem to be an option. But it can be. We do, as a society, have the option.
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