On Life, Writing, and Artificial Intelligence
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“I didn’t know what email was until I got to college. I had heard of email and knew that in some sense I would “have” it.”
Elif Batuman
The ChatGPT revolution happened while I was working a full-time co-op position. Everyone seemed to be talking about this new technology which would inevitably become a part of my life. Back on campus, I would hear bits and pieces of ways it could be used. There was a time when a friend of mine couldn’t figure out a question on their engineering problem set: “Oh, I don’t know, let’s just enter it into ChatGPT and see what it comes up with.” Often, that statement would be paired with a joking tone, betraying the ethicality of the statement. It certainly wasn’t the first time that I’ve witnessed the use of online resources to help with studying, but something about ChatGPT felt different. I was, admittedly, very removed from the whole situation, until I came back to classes at Drexel, realizing it was a much different place from how I had left it.
Many things that I had once seen as constant were being challenged by the rise of AI. I
returned to the writing center to see that my role as a tutor had completely changed over the course of a summer. During our fall training session, we spent time discussing the university’s AI policies and what was and was not permitted. The infamous “ChatGPT papers” would sometimes come through the center, and we discussed how they could be identified. Characteristically, they were devoid of human voice, and missing specific emotional details. These papers were mere skeletons of memories, sucked dry of their original value. Sometimes, you just had this feeling that the paper that someone was writing wasn’t their own words, but that was an awkward line to cross of accusing someone of such. There was always a sinking feeling of not being able to correctly identify what was happening and distinguishing reality from fiction
became increasingly more difficult on the job.
Technology has revolutionized the world time and again, sometimes starting with
different intentions and being reinterpreted into different contexts. For example, before writing systems, people had a reduced capability to store their thoughts. Life was more instinctual—animalistic—in the sense that people could only deal with things that were immediately in front of them. Hunt. Eat. Run. The moment that people started to write was when we realized a thought could span longer than a moment—a lifetime, for that matter. Later down the line, with the development of email, we could instantaneously transmit feelings across to another person, who may not even be directly with us in the moment. Across time, across distance, and defying physical concepts. But as writing systems and emails were once unfamiliar to us in the past, is AI destined to play a similar role for this generation?
One of the most pressing issues about ChatGPT is that, by nature, it has expertise in an endless number of topics. In social epistemology, expertise is characterized by “possessing a significantly greater amount of accurate information about a specific subject compared to the majority of individuals in a given community,” (Chavanayarn, 2023). Based on this definition, ChatGPT has the potential to be deemed the expert in many different rooms and contexts. However, if we define expertise purely based on the ability to reproduce accurate information, this devalues the ability of a real expert to interpret, analyze, and generate new information. This idea of misplaced expertise reminds me of the philosophy of the “banking concept of education,” which was coined by Brazilian philosopher, Paulo Freire, in his book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Freire makes a compelling argument against a passive education, in which students do not question the systems in which their world has been built. He argues that students are at risk of becoming “receptacles” to be “filled” by the teacher if they do not take ownership of their education. Similarly, if we place too much trust in AI-generated information, this “hinder[s] responsible decision and compromise[s] intellectual autonomy” (Chavanayarn, 2023), which is dangerous to the pursuit of an education.
Artificial intelligence cannot completely replace the human interaction that comes with interacting with a tutor one-on-one. There’s the feeling of the chair beneath you, as you lean over the table to ponder the flow of a sentence, the palpable anxiety, which is sometimes felt, when it is drawing close to a deadline, and a student has no idea how they are going to write their essay. If a student were to enter their essay into ChatGPT, the computer would yield impeccable grammatical corrections, but there’s a whole emotional dimension that is completely lacking from that sort of exchange. Tutors serve an important role in supporting students with all aspects of writing. We may not have all the answers, but that’s not the point. We aren’t grammar machines. We want to show people that there are many ways to write and to teach people how to tap into a place of genuine self-expression.
From the wisdom of Freire, “Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-
invention through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other.” (Freire, 1968). That’s a really important quote to me, which has served as a guiding principle in everything that I do. The human thing about teaching and learning is that sometimes you just don’t get what you expect, unlike with ChatGPT, there’s not a component of tiredness, anger, or sadness, which can completely skew the dynamic of an interaction. Its responses are algorithmic and formulaic. The greatest lessons from life sometimes come from moments that didn’t always have a satisfying, or predictable outcome. In this post-pandemic liminal space, I’ve come to realize: that anything is possible; anything can happen—but we can take those uncertainties as an opportunity to come to terms with who we are.
References
Chavanayarn, S. (2023). Navigating Ethical Complexities Through Epistemological Analysis of ChatGPT. Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society, 0(0), https://doi-org.ezproxy2.library.drexel.edu/10.1177/02704676231216355
Freiré, P. (1968). Pedagogy of the Oppressed.