Written by Donna Lanclos and Lawrie Phipps
I yelled at my friend today about my frustrations with the discourse in higher education about “AI” (MACHINE LEARNING) and then he offered to write about it with me to stop me yelling so here we are. I hate the title, and now you can too. I’m so pissed off. Probably evidence that I need to step away from everything. And, I will, soon.
Why am I angry? It’s December 2022, it feels like this is a moment in time when something tipped, or more likely a bunch of techbros decided it was time to tip something over. There has been a recent surge in discussions about the implications of Machine Learning tools or Large Language Models for education very broadly. (THIS IS NOT AI). And then we started hearing the questions: “What will students do with these tools?” and “How can we catch them?” and “What will we do with all of the misinformation that people will put into the world with these tools?” and “How can we catch them?” and also “When will these tools replace actual writers (cf. “When will these tools replace actual artists?” from a few months ago.??)
The reactive churn of this bullshit is exhausting. I see folks playing with the tools (and let’s be real clear here – the folks that are playing with them are training them for free, to the benefit of the VCs who funded these tools hoping to get closer to the AI they think is inevitable given their belief in EA).
I am so frustrated.
What does it mean that you can generate a paragraph of semi-coherent text? What does it mean that with time (training, free labor) that text will get more coherent? What do you want to happen? Why does this need our attention? How is this different from any other tech horror or tech solution we have been presented with?
And are you sure?
I feel like we are presented over and over, by the techbros who fund a lot of these kinds of things, with this
And I don’t want my attention sucked away by them. I don’t.
There are so many other things we need to pay attention to.
We are still dealing with a pandemic! We are continuing to reap the negative consequences of government austerity (especially those of us in the US and the UK) for our public sector, including universities.
We have students in poverty. We have precarious lecturers. Climate change is real.
But sure let’s look at the shiny new toy.
I am tired of the ways that educators and students are expected to ask “how high” to the latest techbro forays into disruption that want them to“jump”.
We are already dealing with vendors in education who are trying to drive their own agendas and our pedagogy, with their technology. They are not doing this for altruism, they are doing it to capture a market, make a fast buck, and move on to the next thing (if they are doing it for the good of education let’s see an open API ecosystem and standards compliance).
It feels a bit like being told to worry about the economy when people are dying from COVID. It feels a bit like being told to worry about grades when students are suffering from the isolation and associated (justified!) anxieties they experienced in trying to survive the pandemic.
Soon, we, are going to be teaching a couple of classes for people in climate leadership positions. People who are trying to make sense of the chaos of information, misinformation, lies and outright conspiracy nut job articles. We now have to consider this auto generated, non-sourced, click bait content. It’s not a new literacy for our students to learn, they already have the tools to spot good information, but this nonsense adds to the noise. And in the same way that we would get them to review a couple of essay-mill products, we might get them to compare and critically evaluate a couple of articles generated by these tools – so they can spot them faster and dismiss them.
These Machine Learning toys are things that are important to other people, for bad reasons (usually money, but also power), and are being shoved at us so that we aren’t allowed the capacity to care about the things that matter (vulnerable people, our precarious present).
