Being Human:  An Anti-AI Educational Statement

Note: This post is part of a series about how BMCC faculty are addressing generative AI in their classrooms. Interested in sharing your perspective? Email us at FacultyCollaboratory@bmcc.cuny.edu for more information.

At this point, common sense should foster skepticism around AI pedagogy leading to successful educational outcomes. Back in the early aughts, I taught at an elite college preparatory academy where every classroom was equipped with Wi-Fi and every student armed with hybrid laptop/tablets. Optimism abounded with notions that these technologies would “revolutionize education and empower our students.” Twenty years later, there is no evidence to suggest internet technologies in the classroom improved education; in fact, evidence suggests exactly the opposite: math and reading scores plummeted after 2020; screentime in the form of social media has contributed to a mental health crisis among teenagers (especially young girls); schools around the country are now removing Chromebooks and banning smartphones in classrooms.

Gen Z is the first generation in modern history to score lower than their parents’ generation on standardized tests. The COVID-19 global pandemic accelerated many of the trends around internet technology in education by making every class online. The results were catastrophic both academically and socially. We college professors have experienced firsthand the downstream impact of COVID policies that stymied the development of kids by removing them from physical classrooms. What will it take for educators to open their eyes to the deleterious impact of screens?

It’s not hard to understand what incentivizes the recent embrace of AI in education. Schools and colleges are a market for Big Tech: just as Chromebooks and tablets were pushed into classrooms over the past two decades, companies now wish to push generative AI with no evidence that it will produce good educational outcomes. Consumers are also incentivized to offload intellectual labor they deem challenging by outsourcing their reading, writing, and thinking to machines. Why engage in the dull work of reading books and articles or writing analytical essays when we can engage in more meaningful activities like thumbing our social media feeds of vertical videos that endlessly entertain us?

Colleges and schools should be asking themselves what education means. What does it mean to be an educated person? How does one become such a person? Is education simply finding the correct answers? If generative AI is so amazing, why should anyone go to school at all? If chatbots can supply the knowledge of a subject by synthesizing data and generating work, what purpose do we serve at colleges and universities?

As an educator, I believe in academic integrity. The challenges posed by ChatGPT have forced me to rethink everything. ChatGPT provides users with a product that bypasses process. Process is the province where education happens, and that’s what I assess in my classes. We now spend much of the writing process in class, using a workshop approach in which we prewrite, conference, peer review, and compose essays by hand through the use of blue books. After reading and discussing an assigned article, I will sometimes project a summary by ChatGPT to show the students how LLMs make predictions based on patterns, and how the output often produces either weak or wrong summaries. It gives students a chance to see not only the hallucinations, but also the bland summaries that would only pass muster for those who never take the time to actually read the articles. Most important, this exercise helps my students to understand why they need to possess a foundation of knowledge in order to assess the quality of AI generated work.

What I’m describing should be called a human-centered pedagogy, which abides by a maxim that I repeat to my students all the time: “the magic is in the work.” The work we wish to avoid is exactly what we must confront to become better readers, writers, and thinkers; the work cultivates discipline and habits of mind that transform us into humans with substance. The full embrace and adoption of AI in classrooms poses more risks than cognitive atrophy; it projects a future in which human labor, intelligence, creativity, and purpose become dispensable. Those of us who serve in institutions of knowledge should commit ourselves to being adults and gatekeepers in the best sense. We should commit to being human.