Generative Artificial Intelligence:
From Fear to Acceptance
By Mark Nepper
Sir Roger Bannister breaking the 4-minute mile
Excited about this new toy that I wasn’t sure I liked or would embrace, I told a friend about ChatGPT. The concept of generative artificial intelligence scared and intrigued me. My friend and I asked it to write a poem about the joy of a child on Christmas morning.
It was ok.
Then we asked it to define curiosity and identify curious people in history. Interestingly, ChatGPT only offered many curious men. When we directed it to identify curious women in history, it showed only one woman.
Then my friend, emboldened and curious herself, posed a question that made me cringe. “Do you really want to see that?” Sure, why not, she said, shrugging her shoulders.
“Write my obituary.”
ChatGPT instantly came away with an obituary so bland it would make oatmeal blush. It contained no details of her life, only places where she could insert those details.
“I guess my life isn’t very exciting. I’d better get going.” She laughed.
This innocent exchange showed the limitations of generative artificial intelligence.
A line has always stuck with me from the 1987 movie “Amazing Grace and Chuck.” It seems appropriate as we consider the ramifications of this new technological wave. A young boy stops playing baseball because of the threat of nuclear war. He decides he must give up his best thing to make a statement, to push for change. If everybody gave up their best thing to stop nuclear proliferation, stopping it could become reality. If only! In this fantasy, the world comes to a stop until the world powers sign treaties to vastly reduce nuclear weapons capacity.
At one point in the movie, the President of the United States says to this boy, Chuck, You don’t have the right to run into a crowded theater and yell fire.
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To which, Chuck says, “But sir, what if there is a fire?”
Sometimes there really is a calamitous fire. Sometimes it registers as less extreme.
When alarm bells first chimed about the threats of artificial intelligence, many people also expressed fears about the falling sky. We have known about AI for years, decades. But Open AI made a big splash when it introduced ChatGPT. Suddenly, educators everywhere decried the threat of AI to academic integrity. The cries of confusion and fear came loudly demonstrating educators’ panic about the impact AI would have on education in general and their classrooms in particular.
As we have moved past the initial fears and have accepted this new technological reality won’t disappear, teachers have done what they always do. Teachers pivot. They adapt. They make the unknown known, and then they teach what so recently generated their fear and angst.
Professional development and workshop opportunities that already have sprung up are helping some educators figure this out together. They then will share what they have learned with other educators. They are developing creative approaches for how to use AI in their own classrooms that move away from the tendency to punish students who use it presumably for cheating. They are finding ways to make it a meaningful educational tool, not something to replace or eliminate teaching, but a tool to help better teach writing.
And it is a tool. It is something to use, not something to fear or ban because of what it might do or how students might use it. Teachers will develop strategies to teach ethical and effective use. Generative artificial intelligence doesn’t mean the end of the world is coming. It just means our society is now moving into yet another phase of the Information Age.
These seismic shifts can rock society. The first might have been the Industrial Revolution, when the agrarian society began to diminish. That led to the Machine Age, and then sadly the Nuclear Age, then the excitement of the Space Age. We are now in the Information Age.
When we think about societal shifts, a predictable pattern emerges. We begin by looking with terror at this newfangled thing. As we get used to the idea, we might feel the terror abate, but we still don’t want this to infect our way of life. Then we start to accept that it won’t go away. We start to find ways to embrace it so the new idea stops being new and becomes commonplace.
The advent of the four-minute mile followed this pattern. Naysayers claimed the 4-minute mile would never happen. Then in 1954, Sir Roger Bannister of England ran the first four-minute mile. His record lasted just 46 days. While not commonplace elite runners now routinely clock four-minute miles.
The same kind of change likely will happen with ChatGPT and other generative artificial intelligence options. We will learn how to use this machine as a tool. English teachers will find ways to use it to better instruct writing while making students aware of its limitations. They will caution students to avoid it when trying to write creatively or to show tone or emotion. ChatGPT can’t handle these writing elements well if at all.
My mom liked to say that the difference between anger or fear and acceptance is time. In time we will understand the affordances and constraints of generative AI.
We will know the sky is not falling. We will recognize that ChatGPT is not human. It is a machine. It won’t kill us. It can be an effective tool to help in creating certain kinds of writing that will help students learn.
Still, I know intuitively it has its limitations.
I don’t want it to write lyrics for Bruce Springsteen to sing.
I don’t want it writing poems in the style of ee cummings.
I especially don’t want it writing my obituary.
