Visions of a Post-AI World
Taken from Vol. 49, Issue 2 of my schoool publication Cuspidor.
After the monumental launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, there has been a sea of concerns about the threat AI presents to academic integrity in schools. Italy has banned it (then unbanned it by the time this took to publish),1 American school boards have blocked it,2 and our very own UTS alumni have even created ingenious technologies that detect AI writing.3
Unfortunately – and even though these measures are admirable in intent – none actually solve the problem at hand. New technologies will continue to enter the market, AI developers will continue dodging regulations, and of course, students will always find new ways to cheat. Even the rich and powerful have only managed to come up with half-baked, band-aid solutions to this AI takeover. Elon Musk’s recently proposed six-month pause to all AI research was met with considerable support, but I’ll let ChatGPT itself tell you how effective that’ll be:
Maybe Elon Musk and Edward Tian are missing the point. Maybe the arrival of AI tools in the mainstream doesn’t warrant an all-encompassing ban, but a fundamental reconception of the way humans and technology coexist.4
When asked about students writing their essays using AI, coordinators of the International Baccalaureate (IB) program had a surprisingly good response. In a statement published on March 1st, they said: “We need to adapt and transform our educational programmes and assessment practices so that students can use these new AI tools ethically and effectively”.5 IB students are now allowed to include AI writing in their essays as long as they cite it. At first glance this seems surprisingly lax, worrying many parents that it would allow students to take the easy way out. However, I think they’re onto something: school should prepare students for the real world, and we live in a world that will soon be dominated by AI.
As an example, let’s look at the way programmers are taught. New programming students quickly realize that there exists a vast supply of free resources on the internet like forums and courses that make learning much easier, making coding one of the easiest professions to self-study. While most students in other subjects are prohibited from consulting external resources in their classes, programmers are allowed, and often even encouraged to use the Internet. Why is this the case?
Learning environments should seek to emulate the professional world they prepare students for. A student who brute-forced and memorized their way through university would discover that those skills are useless in a professional setting, while the student who learned to read documentation and find answers on Stack Overflow would be far more equipped for a software job.
When the internet was first introduced, most teachers thought using it counted as cheating. Nowadays, it’s basically essential for every student, which suggests that societal perception adapts to technology. In our present education system, it’s also no coincidence that students cheat using AI the most when forced to do banal, replicable, and meaningless tasks. If the assignment is simply to summarize an article and answer some questions, it’s only natural that a massive language model will do better than a kid. If a machine does a task better than a human can, we shouldn’t be asking why the machine is doing it, but rather why the human is doing it.
The better AI becomes, the more important it is that we know how to use it. There’s no point in a fourth-year software engineering course being taught closed-book, if its graduates will be thrust into a professional setting with a plethora of new tools and no experience using them. The IB program was (for once) right: let students learn to work alongside AI, because that’s what the professional world will also eventually demand.
To humanity’s benefit though, AI is not better than us at everything yet. AI writing might be efficient and logical, but still lacks the flair and rhetoric of an author or poet. AI-generated art might look pretty cool, but doesn’t trigger the same visceral reactions as a painting about human experiences or a heartbreaking song.
Even if AI does surpass us in every field of human endeavor, maybe not all is lost. Maybe there is still enjoyment in the very nature of humanity. I don’t care if complex algorithms created by developers in Mountain View can play chess better than humans ever will, because I’ll still enjoy the games I play with my friends. Maybe watching Stockfish compete with AlphaZero in a championship match might be interesting to some, but nothing comes close to the thrill of competition with people you know, filled with the ups and downs that give it life.6 It’s the quirks, idiosyncrasies, and imperfections of humans that make them actually interesting, which is something that machines won’t ever replicate.
(799)
Works Cited
- McCallum, S. (2023, April 1). ChatGPT banned in Italy over privacy concerns. BBC News. Retrieved April 7, 2023, from https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-65139406
- Johnson, A. (2023, January 31). Chatgpt in schools: Here’s where it’s banned-and how it could potentially help students. Forbes. Retrieved April 7, 2023, from https://www.forbes.com/sites/ariannajohnson/2023/01/18/chatgpt-in-schools-heres-where-its-banned-and-how-it-could-potentially-help-students/?sh=4106b4846e2c
- Becken, B. (2023, January 25). Bot or not? this Canadian developed an app that weeds out ai-generated homework. CBCnews. Retrieved April 7, 2023, from https://www.cbc.ca/radio/day6/ai-generated-homework-1.6725710
- Ng, A. (2023, April 7). Yann LeCun and Andrew Ng: Why the 6-month AI pause is a bad idea. DeepLearningAI. Retrieved April 7, 2023, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BY9KV8uCtj4
- IB Organization, M. G. (2023, March 9). Statement from the IB about CHATGPT and artificial intelligence in assessment and Education. International Baccalaureate®. Retrieved April 7, 2023, from https://www.ibo.org/news/news-about-the-ib/statement-from-the-ib-about-chatgpt-and-artificial-intelligence-in-assessment-and-education/
- Radić, A. (2017, December 7). AlphaZero’s “Immortal Zugzwang Game” against Stockfish. YouTube. Retrieved April 7, 2023, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFXJWPhDsSY
Taken from Vol. 49, Issue 2 of my schoool publication Cuspidor.
After the monumental launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, there has been a sea of concerns about the threat AI presents to academic integrity in schools. Italy has banned it (then unbanned it by the time this took to publish),1 American school boards have blocked it,2 and our very own UTS alumni have even created ingenious technologies that detect AI writing.3
Unfortunately – and even though these measures are admirable in intent – none actually solve the problem at hand. New technologies will continue to enter the market, AI developers will continue dodging regulations, and of course, students will always find new ways to cheat. Even the rich and powerful have only managed to come up with half-baked, band-aid solutions to this AI takeover. Elon Musk’s recently proposed six-month pause to all AI research was met with considerable support, but I’ll let ChatGPT itself tell you how effective that’ll be:
Maybe Elon Musk and Edward Tian are missing the point. Maybe the arrival of AI tools in the mainstream doesn’t warrant an all-encompassing ban, but a fundamental reconception of the way humans and technology coexist.4
When asked about students writing their essays using AI, coordinators of the International Baccalaureate (IB) program had a surprisingly good response. In a statement published on March 1st, they said: “We need to adapt and transform our educational programmes and assessment practices so that students can use these new AI tools ethically and effectively”.5 IB students are now allowed to include AI writing in their essays as long as they cite it. At first glance this seems surprisingly lax, worrying many parents that it would allow students to take the easy way out. However, I think they’re onto something: school should prepare students for the real world, and we live in a world that will soon be dominated by AI.
As an example, let’s look at the way programmers are taught. New programming students quickly realize that there exists a vast supply of free resources on the internet like forums and courses that make learning much easier, making coding one of the easiest professions to self-study. While most students in other subjects are prohibited from consulting external resources in their classes, programmers are allowed, and often even encouraged to use the Internet. Why is this the case?
Learning environments should seek to emulate the professional world they prepare students for. A student who brute-forced and memorized their way through university would discover that those skills are useless in a professional setting, while the student who learned to read documentation and find answers on Stack Overflow would be far more equipped for a software job.
When the internet was first introduced, most teachers thought using it counted as cheating. Nowadays, it’s basically essential for every student, which suggests that societal perception adapts to technology. In our present education system, it’s also no coincidence that students cheat using AI the most when forced to do banal, replicable, and meaningless tasks. If the assignment is simply to summarize an article and answer some questions, it’s only natural that a massive language model will do better than a kid. If a machine does a task better than a human can, we shouldn’t be asking why the machine is doing it, but rather why the human is doing it.
The better AI becomes, the more important it is that we know how to use it. There’s no point in a fourth-year software engineering course being taught closed-book, if its graduates will be thrust into a professional setting with a plethora of new tools and no experience using them. The IB program was (for once) right: let students learn to work alongside AI, because that’s what the professional world will also eventually demand.
To humanity’s benefit though, AI is not better than us at everything yet. AI writing might be efficient and logical, but still lacks the flair and rhetoric of an author or poet. AI-generated art might look pretty cool, but doesn’t trigger the same visceral reactions as a painting about human experiences or a heartbreaking song.
Even if AI does surpass us in every field of human endeavor, maybe not all is lost. Maybe there is still enjoyment in the very nature of humanity. I don’t care if complex algorithms created by developers in Mountain View can play chess better than humans ever will, because I’ll still enjoy the games I play with my friends. Maybe watching Stockfish compete with AlphaZero in a championship match might be interesting to some, but nothing comes close to the thrill of competition with people you know, filled with the ups and downs that give it life.6 It’s the quirks, idiosyncrasies, and imperfections of humans that make them actually interesting, which is something that machines won’t ever replicate.
(799)
Works Cited
- McCallum, S. (2023, April 1). ChatGPT banned in Italy over privacy concerns. BBC News. Retrieved April 7, 2023, from https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-65139406
- Johnson, A. (2023, January 31). Chatgpt in schools: Here’s where it’s banned-and how it could potentially help students. Forbes. Retrieved April 7, 2023, from https://www.forbes.com/sites/ariannajohnson/2023/01/18/chatgpt-in-schools-heres-where-its-banned-and-how-it-could-potentially-help-students/?sh=4106b4846e2c
- Becken, B. (2023, January 25). Bot or not? this Canadian developed an app that weeds out ai-generated homework. CBCnews. Retrieved April 7, 2023, from https://www.cbc.ca/radio/day6/ai-generated-homework-1.6725710
- Ng, A. (2023, April 7). Yann LeCun and Andrew Ng: Why the 6-month AI pause is a bad idea. DeepLearningAI. Retrieved April 7, 2023, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BY9KV8uCtj4
- IB Organization, M. G. (2023, March 9). Statement from the IB about CHATGPT and artificial intelligence in assessment and Education. International Baccalaureate®. Retrieved April 7, 2023, from https://www.ibo.org/news/news-about-the-ib/statement-from-the-ib-about-chatgpt-and-artificial-intelligence-in-assessment-and-education/
- Radić, A. (2017, December 7). AlphaZero’s “Immortal Zugzwang Game” against Stockfish. YouTube. Retrieved April 7, 2023, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFXJWPhDsSY