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LauraBaneSecondEssay 5 - 14 Jan 2025 - Main.EbenMoglen
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Classrooms in the Digital Age: The False Equivalence of AI and the Internet’s Effects on Learning | | | If you were to Google the phrase “Is utilitarianism the superior political philosophy,” you would be met with two types of sources: (i) purely factual sources defining utilitarianism and listing its opposing political philosophies or (ii) opinion-based resources written by real people (e.g. John Stuart Mill). Discerning the two is fairly easy: a source stating “utilitarianism is a political philosophy stating that the collective good should be prioritized above all else” is a factual one, whereas a source arguing that utilitarianism is immoral because the government should not knowingly allow anyone to suffer is an opinion-based one. What’s more, each opinion-based source will be the product of someone’s original thought process. With ChatGPT? and other AI tools, the results for the phrase “Is utilitarianism the superior political philosophy” are likely a blend of fact and opinion, with every opinion being a regurgitation of someone else’s opinion—no independent thought to be found.
My Proposition
The use of AI tools in academic settings ought to be actively discouraged. Even if one were to use AI solely to garner factual information, this is equally possible to accomplish with the Internet, without the risk of AI formatting its answer in a way that seems deceptively argumentative. Additionally, the risk of young, impressionable students using AI to write entire essays is too great—and well established—to ignore. Although the Internet has its own perils (e.g. misinformation, sensationalized information, and distractingly presented information), its benefits far outweigh its risks. The same cannot be said for AI tools. Internet use in connection with school work should be accepted and encouraged, with the condition that students are taught to be media literate, critical of online sources, and aware of the fact that some online information which is designed to maximize efficiency, such as a SparkNotes? summary of War and Peace, will prove more harmful than beneficial. | |
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I think the essay would be stronger as an exploration of your ideas than it is as a report on "some researchers say...." but "on the other hand, perhaps..." The present proportion reverses that priority, and at the same time demonstrates its own proposition that focusing student writing around tools that summarize (whether fact or opinion) don't really maximize learning.
"AI," as I strived to point out in class, is not actually artificial intelligence at all. Neural networks are one kind of software; used for "machine learning" they demonstrate immediate utility but are also, as Chomsky shows, subject to fundamental limitation. But because the utility they achieve is potentially very profitable, and—because it comes at an overwhelming expense in energy expenditure and requires constant overwhelming access to other people's thoughts, words and personal information— can only do so if subsidized by government. Such subsidy is direct, though state contracting to replace humans in the provision of public services and through the provision of public data on preferential terms; and indirect, through legal rules providing immunity from liability and increasing access to other creative works and repertoires of human behavior. Securing those subsidies involves directly confusing the public about the intelligence of "AI" and the obscuring of the basic limitations.
The educational system (public primary, secondary and tertiary schools in particular) then becomes an important—in many respects most important—locus of that struggle for subsidy advantage. Used as a tool to break teachers' unions, eliminate tenure in higher education, reduce the development of critical thinking, and surveil the development of dissenting ideas, fake intelligence can perform many tasks that one or another form of government will consider to be worthy of subsidization.
There are a plethora of directions, therefore, in which you can take the ideas you express as your own in the tail of this draft. I think that's the thinking for which you are personally eager, and it would make an outstanding next draft.
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