Colleagues, I Think We Need to Pay Attention to AI

I plan to use this space to return to semi-regular posting, mainly about the practicalities of teaching in the age of AI.

A year or two ago, I thought that I could, more or less, ignore AI in most of my teaching. I would, in fact, be happy to do so. Recently, however, two developments have made me think that position has become untenable.

First, I had my initial experience of seeing a student turn in substantial work that was obviously AI-generated. Have other students in my classes used AI in ways I did not authorize? Almost certainly. I will not share any details of the case, for obvious reasons, but it reinforced my fear that AI will function as an inequality accelerator (IA!). Students with a highly developed sense of academic genres may be able to use AI to work more quickly and, in some ways, more effectively. Students already struggling with college-level work may use it more clumsily, as a response to insecurity or panic. Seeing this dynamic in action made me feel that, as a matter of pedagogical ethics, I need to try to mitigate the effects of AI as IA.

Second, I tried out some trials of basic assignments in poetry analysis in the new (“sonnet”) version of claude.ai. I’ll explain this further in a later post, but I saw something I had not seen before in ChatGPT: Claude’s results were doing effective work with quotations of poetry. That development changes the game for literary studies. We are undergoing a shift, not primarily in writing, but mainly the processes of reading and research. We’re going to need much more than academic honesty policies to respond.

I’ll write more about the details of both of those points in upcoming posts. The main point I was to share for now is that two months ago, I thought we teachers of the humanities would need a fairly detailed understanding of AI’s capacities in the medium-term future. Today, I think we need that understanding immediately, and my sense is that very few of us have it. Certainly, I have a lot to learn.

Things I will NOT attempt to do because other people are far better equipped to tackle these tasks:

• Advocate for the use of AI. (But yes, I am astonished by what it can do.)
• Advocate against the use of AI. (But yes, I am unsettled by what it can do.)
• Critique the structural, labor, and environmental issues raised by AI technologies. (But yes, I am alarmed.)

Rather, I will use this space to work through my own anxious preoccupation with the practical questions we need to address together: What is the world of text that our students now inhabit? What training–formal or informal–and expectations do they now bring to my classroom? What, in short, is my job as an English professor at a liberal arts college?

More to come. If you have questions or thoughts to share, I’d love to hear them.