Authentic Intelligence

    A spectre haunts our future - a spectre of Artificial Intelligence. Anyone who teaches young people can share stories of students who would prefer to outsource their thinking to this spectre, readily employing it to complete even simple assignments. They skip the hard work of researching, writing, and revision because in just a matter of seconds, an AI chatbot can complete all of those tasks for them. Equally concerning is the number of teachers who use it themselves to create assignments, questions, and rubrics. Some even use it to grade students’ work. AI created tasks are responded to with more AI. Teachers and students are rushing headlong into obsolescence. 

    Rather than seeing this as an existential threat, one that will lead to a crisis in education, this process is encouraged by school administrations. Professional development is mandated on how to integrate Artificial Intelligence into classrooms. Teachers who raise concerns are accused of burying their heads in the sand. Proponents will often derisively compare such teachers to Socrates and Plato: the geniuses who laid the foundations of Western thought are treated as hapless luddites, because those authors once conducted a thought experiment where they explored the negatives of the written word. AI is a new technology to be embraced, they say, the way writing ultimately was by the ancients.

    I humbly offer another comparison. In the 1968 United States Presidential Election Governor George Wallace ran on a third-party ticket and picked General Curtis Lemay as his Vice President. In his one and only press conference, Lemay accused Americans of having a “phobia” of nuclear bombs. He advocated for the wider acceptance of these weapons, arguing that they were “necessary” and efficient”, and that ultimately it was better to die by these newer weapons than by a more primitive weapon. Happily he was met with shock and derision.

          A phobia of destabilising technologies can be useful and healthy. There is nothing intuitive in the idea that the technological innovations of the last twenty years - web 2.0, social media, generative AI - have been a societal good. For young people in particular they seem positively negative. Rather than hosting lectures that could be titled “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bot”, schools should try to undo some of the damage. Authentic intelligence, taught through teacher and student inquiry and collaboration, should not be consigned to the dustbins. Handwritten, device-free slow learning - which was the norm until about ten years ago - still has value. Rejecting Artificial Intelligence in the classroom is not laziness, nor is it insolence - it is an obligation. Teachers have an imperative to affirm the genuine intelligence and humanity of their students; in embracing AI, students have nothing to lose but their brains.