A Little Rage, Against the Dying of the Light

Photo by David Gomez on Unsplash

After spending way too much time yesterday, thinking about that paywalled New York Magazine article about everyone cheating with ChatGPT (which I read only because a colleague cut and pasted it into my Facebook feed), my husband and I were ranting about AI in the kitchen. My daughter, who is about to be nine and about to finish 3rd grade, had apparently been eavesdropping. As I was tucking her into bed she asked me with trepidation, “is AI going to take over education and make me dumb?” As she fell asleep, I had a good cry. Then my husband reassured me that we are going to “rage, rage against the dying of the light”, even if “none of your students know what that means.” This morning, feeling sort of desperate (and feeling like laconic AI policies aren’t really doing much) I started to think that I need to include a “Principles” section in my syllabi, from now on, to read with my students on day one. But I feel like I’m trying to talk to them through bullet proof glass these days. What do you think? Will a ChatGPT style listicle get something through? Or is it just more wasted space in the syllabus? Posted below…

The following are principles that guide me in my work, including the work that I do in this classroom. I want to share them with you, so that you can understand why I teach the way that I teach. But I also invite you to embrace these principles with me:

1. We are human. We are also animals, like squirrels, with complex animal needs and urges. But the particular sort of animal we are is the human variety. Squirrels have the incredible capacity to use their sense of smell, and deft spatial awareness, to remember where they’ve buried all their nuts. We use our mental capacities in different ways. But we too can use our powers of thought to do incredible things. Tapping into those powers is one of the best ways to remember that we are human, and to feel our humanity.

2. Thinking is kind of miraculous. There is an ethereal sort of movement happening inside the spacetime of our bodies. It feeds us signals all of the time, and we created languages so that we can express these signals to one another. We call this thinking, and we refer to “the mind” as the inner capacity that gives us the power to do this. There is a reason why, for thousands of years, people have been hypothesizing that this ethereal movement—our mind—is the force within us that gods and spirits tap into, or feed. We can do incredible, perhaps almost miraculous, things with our minds: we can travel into other dimensions. Thinking isn’t simply cognition or calculation. It’s a symphonic coordination of our body’s knowledge, our sense perception, our awareness of the environment around us, our emotions, and that ethereal movement within us.

3. Anything that preserves time and space for thinking is sacred. Thinking may be miraculous, but it’s also difficult. People (parents, bosses, teachers) demand that we do it, but no one actually wants to give us the time and space we really need for it. In my analysis, the classroom should be precisely that kind of space. But education in America, like all of our other institutions, is broken. Perhaps, in your own education, you’ve never once experienced the classroom as a place where you’ve had the pleasure of using your mind, and feeling it soar. I’m sorry if you haven’t. I know it’s a lofty ideal, but I want to believe that it’s possible for all of us to do that, with some frequency, in our classroom. That’s why I set it apart as something sacred, special, and unlike anything else: I believe that the classroom has the potential to be a place where we all experience our powers of thought, together.

4. AI is stripping us of our powers of thought. Large Language Models like ChatGPT source the records of thousands of years of human thinking in order to offer us information. But this information is presented to us as if it were simply created by an app. The sheer efficiency and concision of AI can feel almost miraculous. Some people even want to think of it as god-like. But AI encourages us to dehumanize thinking, and that is its greatest deception. I’m not saying that thinking is only human (other animals think!) But the ideas and information that AI feeds us come from human thinking. AI would be nothing without the thousands of years of human thought that it sources. The more power we cede to AI (the more we use it, the more we offload our thinking onto it), the more we forget who we are. We are humans, with thousands of years of powerful thinking behind us, ready to whisper us secrets at any moment so that we can continue to try and make our way through life on this sometimes hostile planet, with wisdom and compassion.

5. AI is stripping our planet of its powers. One of the distinct things about our planet is that it’s covered with water. Water, especially fresh water, is the reason why we can live here. People aren’t wrong when they say “water is life.” But we are rapidly running out of clean, fresh water to drink. Our rivers are drying up, and our water is being poisoned. But we need water to live, and to think. And so does AI. Indeed, AI servers (which are insanely resource intensive) require incredible amounts of water in order to function. Some estimates claim that for every AI prompt you submit to ChatGPT, approximately 16 oz of water (the amount in a typical plastic bottle of water) are needed to cool the servers. Meanwhile, people on our planet are dying of thirst, and the rest of us worry that people of the future will not have clean water to drink. Nothing is free, not even ChatGPT. We are paying for it with our future, which doesn’t even exist yet. In other words, we are gambling and already deeply in debt.

6. We have a responsibility to resist the tide. Deep within those reservoirs of thought that have been preserved by humans—those records that AI sources, in order to gain its incredible power—are billions of terrible, horrible, no good, and indeed very bad ideas. Along with those ideas are billions of treasures: pearls of wisdom, bubbles of pleasure, soothing messages to make our hearts soar. That is the mixed heritage that’s been given to us, as humans. This is what AI mirrors back to you, when you use it: your own complicated and mixed human intelligence. For the sake of our many ancestors, and for the sake of the humans of the future, we have the responsibility to preserve that heritage, to understand the beautiful and horrific humanity of it, and to preserve multiple forms of access to it. We cannot let any one medium, learning model, app, or corporation delude us into thinking that it is our best source of knowledge. Our sources of knowledge are as messy, complex, and difficult to navigate as we are. But they are little wonders like we are, too. This is why, against the tide, I ask you to resist using AI for the work you do in and for our classroom. I understand that there are growing numbers of people who are offloading their thinking onto ChatGPT. But the idealistic question I want to keep asking is: what if we didn’t? What if the powers our minds didn’t atrophy? What if we didn’t lose contact with the live wires of intellectual power that other human beings have been laying out for us, for thousands of years? What might happen, then? What might we see? What might we understand?