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Great Philosophers Against AI
I wrote an article about how the philosophers Zhuangzi, Plato, Martin Heidegger, and C. S. Lewis can give us some good advice about the dangers of using AI in academic writing. It’s open-access here. I’ll borrow a few quotes below.
Using AI in our writing can bring some benefits, such as the ability to produce (somewhat) reliable summaries of large blocks of text in an instant. But what is it, like all the other writing technologies, taking away? If we’re not careful, AI writing trains us to follow preexisting patterns of words with minimal comprehension.
Observations of student submissions reveal notable changes following the introduction of ChatGPT. Turnitin similarity scores have generally decreased, while the overall quality of English grammar in written assignments has improved. But I often find in student assignments piles of information consistent with easily accessible internet material, with little to no evidence of conscious interaction with course content. My students are accumulating information with no knowledge.
Plato teaches us not to let technology substitute for the necessary work of human thought, producing more information with less comprehension. Students daily are using AI-writing to produce more information faster, but with less input from their own minds and less understanding. Heidegger warns us to not reduce ourselves to parts of a machine creating products. Academic writing should be a process of people using their writing tools to shape a little bit of the world. It should not be a process that uses people to create a product. Students are now letting AI create their writing, surrendering to an algorithm their own role as shepherds of the process. Zhuangzi urges us to not follow social convention, but AI-writing all too often takes social conventions as manifested on the internet and distills them into a neat little package. And Lewis says that we destroy our own humanity when we use powerful technology to get what we want without first learning to want what is good. AI-writing sacrifices the human love of discovering and understanding the truth, submitting our words to conditioning by someone who wrote some algorithms.
These great philosophies warn us that the use of AI in writing can steal a piece of our humanity from us. A character in Star Trek: Insurrection, probably the most Daoist of Star Trek productions, introduced the idea well enough: “We believe when you create a machine to do the work of a man, you take something away from the man” (Frakes, 1999).
Published in General
How should we proceed with this information? The first step is to develop an awareness of the situation. Perhaps the strongest protection against losing some of ourselves to a careless use of this new technology is simply to recognize the value—the objective value, Lewis reminds us—of what is at risk. A human being, and some hard work by that human being in learning for himself to think and to communicate well—those things matter.
The blockquotes aren’t properly indented in the PDF. I emailed them about it.
This teacher’s examples of student AI cheating are very familiar.
Since the PDF of my article doesn’t do the blockquotes properly, here’s one of my examples with my brief commentary:
I will let one more long example pass with little comment. The question was “What does Nietzsche say about Christianity and otherworldliness?” The student’s answer recycles, with minimal clarity, a lot of general information available online and gives no hint of interacting either with the reading or with the simple explanation in class notes. The unusually good grammar and American spelling (in Hong Kong!) only help to confirm that the student did little work and learned little:
Why-oh-why would it seem like a good idea to let a piece of technology reconstruct everyone else’s thought patterns in a person’s own writings?
The value of a tool depends on the skill of its wielder.
Except for two-man saws. Generally, it’s all you can do to not throttle the guy at the other end.
Now there is philosophy I can get behind.
I find that surprising. Is it really that hard not to throttle the guy when you’ve got eight feet of sharpened steel right there?
What I’m hearing is that despite appearances nothing has changed.
Well, the cheating happens faster, and I’m not allowed to punish it with a grade of 0 because there’s no way of proving it happened at all. That’s new.
This is an extremely important point in a whole lot of contexts. As the saying goes fire makes a powerful servant but a terrible master. That goes for all technology. If you ever treat people like parts of a machine you’re walking down a very dark path.
https://wipfandstock.com/9781498232340/science-fiction-and-the-abolition-of-man/
I’m increasingly aware of the assault on language. Logos. God spoke creation into existence. Language corrupted, diminished, distorted … is the work of the enemy. I’ll leave it at that for now.
My thoughts while grading late at night:
This is definitely going in the Friday email!
The steel is poorly configured for chasing someone.
ChatGPT responds:
That is about what I would have said.
Maybe I’m an AI.
Probably apocryphal but I saw a blurb about a professor issuing a detailed warning to students about the ways in which he could recognize papers written by AI. The next paper turned in began: “Of course. Here is a revised draft with some spelling errors included.”
I wonder how these kids would do with an in-class essay assignment. I’m guessing the product would be pathetic.
It’s getting better. Still wrong.
AI is what the old Peanuts kids’ medical book said about computers–faster, but not a bit smarter.
Most importantly, it’s describing choices. Most of us will make the wrong choices because of laziness.
We have an annoyingly good final exam system here.
Thank Heaven.
Bluebooks to the rescue.
I’ve used AI sometimes to ask it to refute a proposition, just to see if there are any cogent arguments that I hadn’t considered.
What you want is a partner who’s “light-on-the-saw;” who, when you’re pulling the saw through the trunk on your stroke, doesn’t make you pull him too.
That seems legit. And there are lot of other things that might work. I mentioned two in my article.
I think the good uses would capitalize on what I said earlier: It’s faster, but not smarter. I think that’s how you’re using it.
What’s distressing about AI in education is the students are using it before they learn how to work without it. It’s like handing them calculators in first grade before they know how to do math without them.
I think this is the book I have in mind.
Why, it will guarantee an Ivy League education and degree, particularly as plagiarism seems to be the sine qua non of elite education.
As a contrarian, I must comment on Heidegger’s advice, to not allow ourselves to be reduced to parts of a machine producing products (I must, I must).
This is the man who banned human transcendence (metaphysics) from polite philosophical discussion, and to make his point, he fired Husserl, his colleague, from the Academy, for suggesting even a slight whisker of transcendence (and being Jewish), and was a member of, and philosopher to, the Party that placed the sign: ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ above their death camps.
I visited Auschwitz in the 1990s. On return to my hotel room after the tour, at which point I was physically sick, I happened to hear a CNN report on a Bill Clinton speech, advocating the need to develop our human capital. I still get nauseous whenever I hear the words “Human” and “Capital’ used together.
Yeah, Heidegger has . . . issues. For sure.
What I’m hearing is that he has cause to know.
I’ve remarked on this before, but between reading The Gulag Archipelago and Man’s Search for Meaning I was struck by a number. In the Gulag, if you were stuck in the cooler and did no work you received the penalty ration of ten and a half ounces of bread. In Auschwitz that was the ration given to the class of prisoners sent out for heavy labor digging culverts and the like. This raised in my mind the dark question “who did it better?”
The answer to that, of course, is neither. Victor Frankel and Solzhenitsyn were geniuses, able to contribute great value to mankind, certainly more than ditch digging and brickwork. Whatever utility they had as slaves came from reducing them from humans to parts in a machine.
The question I have right now is “When did Heidegger say that?” Is this something he knew and suppressed, or something that he learned from bitter experience? I’m not going to look it up; it might matter a great deal to Heidegger but not so much to me.
Why would you throttle the guy? When the job is over, you’d have a spare saw to use on him!
Some say God lit creation into being.
@NanoceltTheContrarian
Why do people end up critiquing Heidegger for being a fan of the Nazis?
He was romantically involved with Hannah Arendt, for Pete’s sake. For decades, both before and after the Third Reich.
Also Hesserl was his mentor and gave him a very hard time. That was sometime before Hitler came to power.
Citation: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/heidegger/