This is the fifth post in a series of five on AI. My last post discussed why we need more than prompt engineers, but also subject matter experts. This post discusses the danger of losing that learning if AI is not used in the best ways.
Last spring, I went to a campus reading from New York Times best-selling author and poet Ross Gay. It was well attended by faculty, administrators, employees, community members, and students. In front of me, three students sat with two on laptops and one on a phone. My first thought was a professor required attendance and they were taking notes for an assignment.
A great opportunity on campus was this author’s reading and book signing.
Ross began drawing me in with engaging stories of happiness and sorrow and simple delights found in life if we pay attention. He’s a master observer of joy found in everyday moments. His message and delivery were powerful, yet, my attention was soon distracted by the busy screens in front of me.
Glancing down it was obvious the students weren’t taking notes. They didn’t look up at the author at all. The student in the middle was watching a video on the phone. The two on laptops were jumping back and forth between different websites, documents, emails, and social media.
Despite Ross’s dramatic reading, I had trouble focusing with three screens flitting around in front of me. I imagined what it’s like to be a student in the back of a lecture hall or even a small classroom with dozens of student multitasking screens in front of them.
AI promises to free us from busy work.
Between the author’s readings, I glanced down again, hoping to find evidence of something related to the event and this author. Instead, I noticed the ChatGPT screen. Maybe the student was using it to supplement an assignment or get help with a difficult task. Perhaps I’d see how a professor integrated AI into a class.
Instead, I saw quiz questions from the university learning management system. Each question and answer was quickly copied back and forth between ChatGPT and a course quiz. Twenty questions were answered in less than a minute. I saw no effort to answer questions first or even read them. Did the student not know this was wrong? Or were they so engrossed in the screen that they forgot their surroundings? Perhaps the student views quizzes as busy work, not a learning tool to ensure reading and internalizing information.
AI promises to free us from drudgery to explore human creativity and imagination. The article “How AI can save you time: 5 skills you no longer need to learn,” tells us we can now skip learning skills like writing because AI will do writing like reports and news articles for us. I wonder what creativity the journalist will explore when Euro News outsources articles to AI. I don’t want to be freed from writing. My creativity and imagination are explored through writing and evidence tells us writing is how we learn.
If the student in front of me was using AI to save time to explore human creativity, they missed one of the best opportunities that semester. While they focused on their screen using AI, a poet expressed the joy of being human moving some in the room to tears.
Sometimes there is no shortcut to learning.
Much of AI is being marketed to us and students as a shortcut. The easy way to complete a task, assignment, paper, or degree. In AI’s Promise To Pay Attention For You., Marc Watkins of Mississippi AI Institute, says, “Many third-party app developers are building off of OpenAI’s API to create apps that promise an end-to-end user experience where a machine listens for you, complies with information, and then creates bespoke summaries all so you don’t feel burdened by listening or thinking about the content.”
TikTok is full of student videos promoting these apps as the easy way to an easy grade. I’m all for removing friction to make banking, car buying, and hotel booking easy. But is easy the best way to learn? What if friction and struggle are how we learn? In an op-ed Jane Rosenzweig of Harvard College Writing Center says, “Our students are not products to be moved down a frictionless assembly line, and the hard work of reading, writing, and thinking is not a problem to be solved.”
If not used properly AI can get in the way of learning. This summer I received an email marketing assignment in which a student “wrote” bland generic email copy. Then a paragraph explained how the email “fosters a deep emotional connection with the audience” and “reflects a deep understanding of the target audience’s needs.” But it didn’t! It sounded like the correct but unfeeling, general copy LLMs tend to generate.
The LLM knew what good email copy should do, but couldn’t write it. My student needed to be the human in the loop. I can teach how to write copy that forms an emotional connection with the audience based on human insight, but not if a student uses AI to write the entire assignment. Why would an employer hire them if AI could complete the entire project on its own?
Is liberal arts education the answer to AI job losses?
If AI takes away skills, many say the way to remain relevant is through liberal arts. Business Insider says AI startup founders hire liberal arts grads to get an edge. In Bloomberg, a Goldman Tech Guru says AI is spurring a “Revenge of the Liberal Arts.” WIRED proclaims, “To Own the Future, Read Shakespeare.”
IBM’s AI chief advises students who want a tech job to learn the language and creative thinking skills you get in the liberal arts. Because AI speaks our language not computer code we need prompt engineers “to train it up in human behavior and thinking.”
Marketing AI Institute’s Paul Roetzer believes the next generation entering the workforce will remain relevant with a broad-based liberal arts education. Literature, philosophy, history, and art are what make us human and teach critical thinking, analysis, creativity, communication, collaboration, integrity, understanding, and nuance. What AI can’t do.
But what if AI can also get in the way of learning liberal arts? Using AI to skip the reading and skip the writing skips the learning to save time for what? Doing the reading, processing the information, committing it to memory, and explaining it through writing is how you learn critical thinking and creativity. To have an imagination you need knowledge.
Is AI the answer to our loneliness epidemic?
In 2023, the Surgeon General released an advisory warning of a crisis of loneliness, isolation, and lack of connection. Nearly half in the U.S. experience loneliness which can increase the risk of death comparable to smoking. Rates of anxiety and depression on college campuses have never been higher. More than 60% of college students report at least one mental health problem.
Some are promising AI can solve this problem with Artificial intelligence friends. I sat in a room full of people with an author talking about human connection while students in front of me focused on their screens. Are AI friends really the best solution? What I often see in the classroom is students not talking to each other because they are focused on their screens.
After Ross finished there was a Q&A. A mental health professional behind me wanted to thank him. She gives her patients struggling with anxiety and depression Ross’s books as homework. Many report back that the books make the difference in being able to get out of bed some days.
I did not miss the irony. Many students struggle with anxiety and depression and many feel screen time is a part of it. Yet, here I was between a mental health professional, students, and one of her solutions. A real human in the room. I’m sad for the students who missed out on the joy of the evening – right past the screens taking their attention. In reading Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation my understanding and empathy for Gen Z has grown.
The exception rather than the rule.
It’s important to note this was a couple students. I’m grateful for the larger group of enthusiastically engaged students at the event. In my experience, most students are not looking for the easy way out and want to learn their disciplines by integrating AI in beneficial ways. But they need our guidance.
In a review by Turnitin, they found that of the more than 200 million writing assignments reviewed by Turnitin’s AI detection tool last year, some AI use was detected in just 1 out of 10 assignments. Only 3 out of every 100 were generated mostly by AI.
Education experts warn that focusing too much on AI cheating can cause distrust between instructors and students. We should frame the conversation around ways AI can both support and detract from learning. Our role is AI literacy providing specific guidance on when and when not to use AI.
I hope to educate students on the role of AI in their lives and how to make intentional choices about what to outsource to AI, what to keep for ourselves, and how to prepare for careers with AI to keep humans in the loop.
This Was Human Created Content!
