Statement on the Use of Generative Artificial Intelligence in an Educational Setting
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a set of technologies largely misunderstood by the general public. Most commercially available AI engines use sophisticated algorithms to process data more efficiently than humans working with older, simpler data processing programs. Applications for AI are anywhere where big, complex data sets need speedy analysis to arrive at broad conclusions. AI can provide that, even if the responses are occasionally overly general and/or simply wrong. As experts tell us endlessly, “Don’t let AI make decisions for you.” When AI is applied to large collections of human-written and/or AI-written language to produce desired texts (we’ll call this AIw), the algorithms can do a fair job of (re)producing human writing patterns. The tuning of these algorithms is an ongoing process, and the industry expects constant improvement. Tens of billions are being spent.
AIw has applications across many industries. Business in general is perhaps the primary target for AIw. In less than a minute, an employee can have AI write a structured 10-page report on a potential vendor’s fit for a company. The employee can then tweak the report in less than an hour, and the entire process will end up taking a tenth of the time it would have without AIw. Communications with clients, partners, vendors, suppliers, distributors, legal, etc. can all be made much more efficient, giving the company the opportunity to reduce labor costs. Small business owners benefit in these ways as well, with the additional advantage of having a source of quick copy for marketing and advertising efforts, avoiding expensive third-party copywriters. AIw can produce customized forms, letters, memos, reports–pretty much anything that can be written and has examples available on the internet. The core value for all of these uses is increased productivity.
Students should learn how to manipulate AIw–students going into business, in particular. AIw will be an expected technology for new hires soon (if not sooner). For educators themselves, this training is not a problem. Training students to use AIw in a business setting is fairly straightforward: theory and practice, theory and practice.
The difficulty of AIw in an educational setting starts with the core value of education: learning. Responsibility for appropriate use of AIw rests squarely on the student. It is the job of instructors to talk with students about the risks of using AIw. The problem for instructors is that the risks are abstract until the students get close to graduation, so some students tend to ignore the warning. And the risks won’t become fully realized until the student is on the job market or in the job. It’s difficult to get young students to believe in the existence of these risks. It’s like climate change: a person can accept the theory but still not really believe the climate system is warming ~10x as rapidly as it has at any point within the last 300m years (Hoenisch et al. 2012) until it bites them in the posterior. It’s just hard for humans to think concretely beyond the next two weeks.
For students, the primary difficulty is the temptation to use AIw to produce writings that satisfy course assignments. This approach is the productivity mindset. The primary purpose of assigned writings is not to have students achieve completion. Completion (check!) is not the primary goal. Engagement is the goal.
An analogy: a golfer doesn’t go to the practice range to use a machine that hits balls with decent accuracy. The purpose of the driving range is not to have balls hit by whatever means necessary. The primary purposes of a driving range are to understand one’s body mechanics, to understand what an effective swing is, and to habituate effective swings through repetition. A person who uses a ball-hitting machine at the driving range will not advance in golfing skill and will likely do very badly at any tournament entered. And why would one spend money at the driving range just to watch a machine hit a ball?
Writing assignments in an educational setting are designed to push students into thinking about their subject, thinking critically about their subject, developing connections between their subject and their experiences, and thinking about their subject and the mechanics of the human and natural worlds (where those two worlds are not shared space). Writing facilitates all of that. It forces the mind to organize information and, in doing so, evaluate both the information and the connections that develop through cognitive processing. When the writing is turned toward an audience, to communicate ideas, writing has the benefit of forcing the writer to think critically about other people (readers), about their own relationship with those people. Indeed, when you write, you are writing yourself, through word choice, syntax, assumptions, and absences. Writing, then, is a major tool for education, arguably the major tool when considering the entire academic project.
Unfortunately, the motivation for students to use AIw simply to complete assignments (check!) is enormous. Most students know or suspect that all of the above is true. Why would a student act against their own long-term best interests? Because they are long-term, and, again, it is atypical for young students to envision the long-term value of habituating a robust critical thinking approach to the world, the kind of approach facilitated by writing about ideas. Students may also be encouraged to use AIw by the argument from productivity, which argues to get the job done using as little effort as possible. Maximize productivity. If that is the dominant value, then check-box thinking will follow. That is, the golf ball simply needs to be hit; the hitting process is irrelevant. The argument from productivity is culturally dominant at the moment, as it is the central value of the currently dominant mode of economic production.
Is it safe to assume that the liberal arts and sciences mission is to help students understand the world in which they live, and not from a narrow, discipline- and/or culture-specific perspective, but from a wide range of perspectives, and that this process includes self-understanding as a subjectivity developed within specific conditions? If yes, then our mission should be to help students understand the outcomes of using AIw as a replacement for thought. Not pushing hard against such use constitutes an educational experiment with the assumptive hypothesis of profound, long-term negative results. It’s not far off to call the use of AIw “academic self-harm.”
You want all that in a single sentence? When a student uses AIw, they skip the struggle of writing about ideas, and the struggle is where the learning occurs, so using AIw prevents learning. Using AIw also erodes confidence. If you are tempted to use AIw, please see your professor, a writing consultant, a subject-area tutor (if available), and/or me, the Writing Center Director (dleaton@truman.edu). Let’s take a breath and a step back, and then take two steps forward in a better direction. You’re not alone in this.