AI, AI, Oh.
As well as writing and leaping about on stage, I run a tuition company. It sounds grand, but in reality, I run a company of one - me. I do it all, from navigating the complexities of the timetable to sorting out invoices (as AI might put it!) I had become increasingly disheartened by some students' use of chat GPT to mark their work, send them model answers and, worst of all, write a number of prepared stories for them to wheel out and try to crowbar into any given prompt they might encounter for the creative writing section. Now, I don't mind them asking chat GPT to mark the odd practise question for them between our lessons, but it's a slippery slope. In the back of my mind, scenarios of classrooms led by robot teachers played out. Would the bots put me out of a job? When I banned the use of AI churning out completely pre-written stories in my learning space, the stunned student looked horrified and asked, 'But where do I get the stories from?' He found it genuinely hard to comprehend my answer, 'From your own brain!'
I do know that some students have specific learning differences and genuinely do not possess a visual imagination, so some pre-prep is necessary - a word bank, a sentence bank and a great generic structure for stories, involving a 'journey', is useful; all stories are some kind of journey - either real or metaphorical or both. But the problem of preparing whole stories via AI is, to put it bluntly, they are mostly crap. AI steals from human creatives to learn how to emulate human art, but without the real emotional understanding of what it is doing, without subtle nuance, and trying for the perfection that isn't human. The result is just 'not quite right'. The story I read from one student's treasure-trove of tales was based on the prompt 'The Gift.' But what they had done after they fed ideas into AI with key sentences and paragraphs, and AI had written a boring story set at a party, was to then take other prompts and come up with five possible stories as a one-size-fits all-for-any-occasion repertoire to churn out under timed conditions. The student's input, whenever the title prompt did not quite fit their agenda, was to mash up two of their ready-made creations. 'The Gift' began in a somewhat pedestrian way: a few AI cliches, some em dashes and triplets, but basically reasonable. However, in the middle of the story, 'the room turned into a coffee-shop'. It was, I told them, total nonsense. 'But it's a metaphor!' they cried. 'It means it suddenly got really full. AI used it in my coffee-shop story where the man gets fired for spilling coffee.' Somehow this 'metaphor' had been lost in translation and plonked clumsily into a line in a story where it clearly did not belong.
And don't get me started on AI marking. AI seems to think phrases like, 'Scary, right?' illustrate an example of 'increasingly sophisticated language and devices'. AI spots a semi-colon and salivates; AI awards high marks to mediocre offerings. Believe me when I say that it doesn't take a great deal of skill with language to get what used to be a grade A. In many exam questions, the student only has to demonstrate the skill once in their entire answer to get to the top, and spelling, punctuation and grammar are not relevant for 50% of the entire exam. I am glad that dyslexia and genuine disabilities are not penalised, but the mark schemes enable a marker to award decent marks to a person who can produce under three sentences in a response as long as they have met the targets.
Which brings me to the insidious creep of AI into everyday life. I, personally see no need for it. It's useful in medicine and science - albeit it we still need humans to check it - but do we really need it to turn on our lights, find recipes, write our emails, create posters, look up the meaning of words? Why don't we use AI to clean our floors, sort out environmental clean-ups, clean the bin, do the dusting - things like that. I want it to free up time for me to create, not create things so I have more time to do the hoovering - it's got it all the wrong way round! As someone put it on instagram earlier this week ( yes, I see the irony) ' why can't AI sort out a solution of real the plastic in the ocean? Why does it always want to be a writer or an artist? Only this week I read a post about an indie artist whose art had ben fed into AI slop and is being sold on TEMU, and she can't do anything about it! We now live in a world where we have to put 'created by humans' on our work and this unnerves me. The final straw for me was to read that Take A Break magazine is now having ALL its fiction generated by AI. No human writers required. Even if I read women's magazines, this would be one I would boycott after that announcement.
We should never be complacent. We could be encouraging the slow death of human creativity. AI is faster, but it is soulless. It lacks the undefinable something that makes us human. It writes the words, but it doesn't feel them. And I am seeing the same sort of formulaic answers time and time again from students who produce an 'analysis' beginning 'The writer uses language to describe...' Well of course they do - they don't use smoke signals, or semaphore (arguably these are also languages). Maybe we are becoming too used to getting AI to write things for us? we start to produce sentences written by an idiot, signifying nothing. If we carry on relying on robots, our critical thinking skills will decline and like the robots themselves, we will churn out 'increasingly sophisticated language and devices', which look superficially impressive, but we will have no understanding of the meaning of them. It's the written word equivalent of a fake Rolex.
Thankfully, the evidence I have seen from reading exam essays suggests that some of our young people are fighting back. They are going analogue. They love vinyl and old phones and cameras. They don't want to read AI email replies that get the 'right' tone when rejecting their job applications. They are sick of soulless AI posters advertising events, and plastic AI music churned out in the gym. They want AI put back in its box, especially in the creative arts. The young people seem to understand that the rise of AI probably has a hidden agenda from the powers that be and it can be broken down into logical steps: remove support for creative studies; discourage creative and critical thinking; encourage worker-drones; keep the status quo. If we cannot think for ourselves folks, we can't criticise 'the system.' I am very heartened to see that some of the young people coming up to voting age seem to have got it sussed. they know when they are being conditioned and duped and they are not willing to accept it. As I said, there may well be a sliver of hope for us all.
In my work, I don't just teach to the exam because I don't have a pile of pointless paperwork to produce. I offer a fully-rounded development of critical thinking and perceptive analysis which is also fun and funny, but equally improves grades (often by 3 levels!) I find that whatever age or level of ability, students are always open to challenging work and are capable of in-depth critical analysis and perceptive layers of thinking if you introduce the concepts to them. This is what we need in the future, not simulated humanity, but the real living, breathing, complex, questioning and imperfect thing. We need to encourage spontaneity, creativity, rebellion, and develop our human intelligence. Let AI do the washing up.
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