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Michael Woudenberg's avatar

I've told students in my Master Degree Project Managment Course that they can use AI as long as they acknowlege it and reflect on whether it's getting the right outcomes. Several have learned to use it to challenge their own writing vs. having it write things for them. Others found it was easier to write their own than rely on the AI. I'd love to do more but at least the conversation is starting to happen.

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Martha Nichols's avatar

Nick, like you, I’m sick of hackneyed articles in which teachers complain about students who refuse to stop using AI (or social media, their phones, etc). It amounts to the equivalent of water-cooler talk among my colleagues when we get together these days (and we do teach graduate students). But even in casual conversation, I hear both pro and con anecdotes about AI. What worries me more is the way these “I’ve had it” articles mask the insidious impact of the technology on conceptions of self and truthfulness.

With Livingstone’s article, she does note in passing that she was doing various AI exercises with her class, but they aren’t detailed. I suspect the article editing cut a lot of nuance, perhaps even pushing for a more definitive ending from her - “I quit!” - than she had originally. I could be wrong, but I also recognize the way magazine editors (being one myself) hone narratives. It’s not unlike the way bots push writers toward definitive conclusions (what I call “bowtie” endings) that undercut the complexity of real life.

AI models have been trained on massive amounts of formulaic human writing, after all. So, just as Livingstone shouldn’t be blaming her students, who are responding to the social context of their tech discipline, I wouldn’t blame Livingstone too harshly. Writing by humans, especially for publication in slick outlets for general audiences, has long been massaged and mediated by editors. One benefit of running AI exercises with my journalism students comes not in highlighting what a bot gets wrong but in describing the article-formula cliches that pop up and why they undercut originality.

I don’t blame Livingstone for expressing frustration. That part seems real enough, even if many of us have yet to pinpoint our uneasiness about the impact of this technology on how we and our students take in the world.

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