Artificial Intelligence is already disrupting education, especially in the humanities and portions of the social sciences. It is part of the “toxic brew” that makes my friend Austin Sarat, an Amherst professor, say that he’s “not ready to return to the classroom” this fall.
Students can use AI to extend their learning–to pose demanding and advanced questions or to summarize bodies of material so that they save time for reading other texts closely. But they can also use AI to reduce the total amount of valuable effort that they would have otherwise committed to a course, thereby learning less from it. As Clay Shirky writes, “If the student’s preferred working methods reduce mental effort, we have to reintroduce that effort somehow.”
I think writing and reading are distinct issues.
AI can assist writers in valuable ways. It can be a thought-partner, a preliminary reader, a copy-editor, and even a drafter of routine passages. Writing for school or college–writing to learn–is a special case, because the goal is not to generate the text but to develop one’s understanding and skills. There can be no substitute for struggling mentally with this task. A student can use AI to help, but a reliable question for students to ask themselves is whether they have invested effort in the document that bears their name. If not, they can’t have learned much or anything.
To some extent, we instructors can alter incentives so that students write without relying on AI. In a course that I am co-teaching this fall, we’ll require an in-class midterm. Oral presentations and exams are worth considering. A new independent study finds that commercial tools are quite good—right now—at detecting AI-generated text.
Nevertheless, students will probably get away with learning less by relying on AI to write in college. My general philosophy is that you can lead the horse to water but not make it drink. Capable college students have always been able to cut corners to the detriment of their own learning. I did so, to some extent, long before AI. (I would sometimes read summaries in secondary sources instead of hard primary texts.) The main question is whether we can inspire and guide students who want to learn to work intensively on forming and expressing their own ideas.
Reading seems more problematic to me. Using AI to summarize texts is both more tempting and harder to monitor than using it for writing. When I open any PDF document in Chrome right now, Adobe pops up to tell me that it can summarize the file for me. ChatPGT usually does a credible job of producing notes on a text, including a whole book–and including whole books that I have written.
Once again, we can use these tools to extend learning. I sometimes use AI to summarize material that (frankly) I do not deeply respect but feel I should dip into. Although I don’t use the time that I save as well as I should, I do reserve some of it for close-reading hard texts.
The case I would make for reading is fundamentally spiritual. We are at grave risk of being caught inside our own limited heads. When we read carefully, we follow someone else’s thinking for a significant time. We are not merely notified of the authors’ main points; we learn how they think, word by word and paragraph by paragraph. We learn what counts as a persuasive point or a telling example or a provocative question for another human being.
I think that many people would concede this point if the author is a literary genius. If you’re going to study Shakespeare at all, you obviously must read his work, because his language is admirable and integral to his project. But I want to make the same point about routine academic authors.
The typical contributor to the Journal of Politics is no William Shakespeare. Yet each competent scholarly author has a distinctive way of constructing an argument, and each subfield or scholarly community has its own shared ways. (Linguists would say that authors have idiolects of their own and dialects for their groups.) Struggling to make sense of a routine yet capable piece of academic writing is a way of getting out of one’s own mind. Of course, it is not the only way. Among many other activities, we should listen to people speak. But reading is one way to escape solipsism, which is a form of spiritual death.
See also: what I would advise students about ChatGPT (my 2023 iteration of these points); a collective model of the ethics of AI in higher education