404 Media's Reporting on Teachers and AI is a Must Read

I recently read an article from 404 Media about how schools were not at all ready for the onslaught of questions of how teachers and students should or should not use AI tools like ChatGPT.

I'm pretty much against it's use for a variety of reasons, namely its massive energy footprint and that it's fed by stealing other people's work.

404 Media then followed up with another article relaying the feedback they got from teachers. I'm the son of a 3rd grade teacher. My mom poured her heart out teaching and helping every student that passed through her classroom. I might very well be biased, but teachers already have it hard with everything they have to deal with. Now dealing with the different AI tools and how to best handle them is only making it worse.

One quote from the responses stood out to me.

Read ChatGPT isn't its own, unique problem. It's a symptom of a totalizing cultural paradigm in which passive consumption and regurgitation of content becomes the status quo. It's a symptom of the world of TikTok and Instagram and perfecting your algorithm, in which some people are professionally deemed the 'content creators,' casting everyone else into the creatively bereft role of the content “consumer." And if that paradigm wins, as it certainly appears to be doing, pretty much everything that has been meaningful about human culture will be undone, in relatively short order.

I would encourage you to read the article and the responses as they provide a lot of good thoughts on where things currently stand in today's classrooms and universities.

One final thought I'll leave you with. I'd like to say that I wouldn't have used AI in school growing up. In high school, with my parents' help, that would probably be true. In college, I really can't say I would've held the same convictions I hold today. There would probably have been times where I would likely have pushed to try to get away with it. Having matured, I can see why that's bad and the value one gets from actually putting in the work. But as teens and young adults, I can understand the push towards "just let the computer do it".