A Question of Values:
Education at the Speed of Light.
“Nobody that uses AI for school is going to care if you tell them they won’t learn. They already don’t care.”
–Henry, an American Teenager
Those of us who grew up in a time before ChatGPT, cell phones, social media, and even laptops remember how it used to be. We remember card catalogs and stacks and books. Indexes and index cards. MLA handbooks and one-inch margins. Our brains were formed in a largely analog world, and we think and communicate through analog means. For us, the natural default setting of discourse consists of having a thought, then figuring out how best to communicate it. We formulate our points, find words, then write; we let what we’ve written sit for a while, simmering, then return to it to hone our points, thinking of better words, revising and rewriting. It can take days, even weeks. Sure our ideas are the children of everything we have read and seen and heard–in books and movies, from our parents and teachers (and for me, apparently, David Foster Wallace, from whom I definitely stole the phrase “natural default setting”) — but still they form in our minds, and we communicate them with our voices or in our writing. We see a purity to that, an honesty. We care about it.
Our students don’t think about that purity. For many of them, the idea of, for example, asking an AI chatbot a question–and even potentially using that answer as part of an assignment or a piece of writing they share with others–causes them no philosophical, moral, or ethical qualms. I recently asked a group of my students to share how they felt about communicating with AI chatbots, like Snapchat’s “My AI.” 50% said they find asking an AI chatbot a question “normal,” with another 15% finding it “interesting” or “useful.” Only 30% found it “weird.”
Asked to elaborate, they noted that communicating with AIs is a way to find new information, the way folks of my generation might use Google–or a book:
- You get a response you never thought could be given plus they could know some info no one you knew would know.
- AI’s can be smarter than us [at] certain things and sometimes it can tell us how other things work.
- Just asking a general question is nothing unusual. If I want to learn what jury duty is, it’s normal to ask an AI and get info on it.
They also made clear that they don’t see AI as a novel technology:
- AI isn’t really that weird because it’s been around for a while.
- Well now in 2024 AI is like normal now.
I find that attitude somewhat bizarre, and at least a little depressing, perhaps because I was a 39-year-old grown up when ChatGPT came out, and now I’m…a 40-year-old grown up. That one year seems like no years. But of course this generational perception clash between students and teachers happens all the time, in relation to all sorts of topics. Recently I had a discussion with my junior English 3 students about what was more important: love or loyalty. 100% of them said loyalty, whereas I said love. I mean, it’s literally “all you need,” right? I’ve read Romeo and Juliet a hundred times. Well, they don’t see it that way.
What is love, they asked, if the person who supposedly loves you betrays you?
But if they love you, they wouldn’t! I responded.
They were unconvinced. They saw the potential for backstabbing at every turn.
I guess what I’m trying to say is, the students we’re teaching–or, at least, the students I teach–just see the world differently than we–or, at least, I–do. What they value is different. Their values are different.
And of course they are. Their natural default setting is communicating through technology. They have friendships that form through headsets during gaming sessions. They already hold conversations with chatbots through Snapchat and other platforms. They study and emulate the dances and gestures and poses they see on social media posts. One recent revelation for me: they observe–and judge–the nuances of the backgrounds behind people on TikTok; I had no idea it went that deep. Their minds may be analog, but their communication is digital, traveling at the speed of light. Their ideas don’t simmer; they are blazing halfway across the world before my ideas put their…well, you know.
As millennial or Gen X teachers, we value books, written communication, original thought. Farming out our thinking to ChatGPT is anathema to us–like hearing a Nirvana song in a car commercial. But to today’s teens, Nirvana isn’t a band, it’s a brand. For people who see the world this way, there is nothing sacred about an original thought.
I’m reminded of the 90s’ preoccupation with “selling out.” There was nothing worse back then. I asked my students if the term “sellout” was meaningful to them, and if so, what it meant. 33% said it didn’t mean anything to them, or they didn’t know the meaning. 28% were able to define it in a way that pretty closely matched my 90s definition (“A sellout is somebody that sells out their morals or loyalties in return for a price or other compensation”). The other 39% had no idea what I was looking for (“Giving up everything for something like going all in on a bet”).
Of course, it’s possible that a group of a couple dozen teenagers in 1996 would have responded the same way. It’s possible that kids now are no different from kids then. But I think what is truly different now is that it has become so much easier to be unoriginal–and that we seem to prefer things that way. Not only do we have limitless access to information, we have limitless access to technologies that allow us to copy each other, to create our version of a song, a dance, a text. In a world where TikTok and ChatGPT are among the most widely-used applications, our society and our students are becoming biased towards duplication rather than creation. If you think about it, selling out has become like breathing.
The question is, does this matter? I’m not sure I can answer that question. My natural default setting is biased towards originality, so of course it matters to me. But is that the same thing as it mattering? I don’t know.
I can’t help but wonder whether we should continue to force our values as educators upon our students. Why does education–at least at my school, at least at most schools–run on our natural default setting? Does it have to? Let’s be real: a lot of our time as teachers is spent trying to get new batches of students to independently arrive at the same ideas our students had the year before (and the year before, and the year before…). Is it really so bad if they use shiny new tools to arrive at those ideas with, well, less thought? Must they have all those thoughts? Would it be easier, or better, if we flipped the switch to our students’ default setting? Would it even be possible?
