by Luke Brake
A very simple assignment I often assign students in my classrooms is a reading response. They are to open a PDF I've provided them, read the document, and write a personal, spiritual response to this document. What I want, as their professor, is to hear what they think about the piece I've assigned. I want them to read, assess, and then respond to this piece with their genuine selves, their hearts. I want to facilitate communication between the student, the author, and me. The meeting of minds and hearts is, I believe, the bedrock of true education.
But here's what happens to that student:
He opens the document, and his Adobe Acrobat program immediately asks him if he'd like their AI to summarize the document for him. It's a long document, it's daunting, likely full of difficult words and arcane grammar. To read it by himself would mean something similar to suffering: the reader would have to work hard, fitting his mind into a text that was made by someone radically different than him. A predator sits at the top of the document, asking him to hand over his agency, to remove his self from the equation.
But maybe he passes the test; he resolves to read, suffer, and learn. Then, remembering a word from the document, he goes to search for a word using the search function. Again, the AI Assistant leans forward and whispers: "Looking for key takeaways? Ask AI Assistant." But again, the brave student chooses agency, life, and pain.
After reading and withstanding the tempter's pleas, the student opens a Google Doc. Immediately a new machine strides confidently onto the white page, offering to "create a document" or, placing words in the mouth of our hero, "help me write." The student knows this is wrong, but it is late, and he can feel his weariness setting in. But he chooses, again, to not surrender his self, his heart, and he writes.
With every line the machine follows him, resting inside an ominous star, urging him to lay down his cursor, to let the machine do the work. At no point is the request not sitting there in the margins. Not content with this, the machine summons another incarnation, lying right beside the student's blinking cursor. "Write with Gemini," it pleads, "Alt-W" it offers, an incantation even more convenient than clicking the star.
Maybe, the student decides to edit his paper. Grammarly, installed by his English teacher in High School, is now equipped with AI tools, who will beg him to use them. Maybe, he goes to a Google search to read context for the reading. He is unable to turn off the AI summary thrust at him, but it doesn't matter much, as about half of the article results are written by the machine anyway.
Every step of the way, as if holding his hand, or nipping his heels, this student is followed by machines that are insisting that he use them. They echo like a chorus:
let us write it for you
let us read it for you
let us think for you
Every action that would require friction, effort, pain, learning, or humanity from the student is fair game. Everything that would make the student greater or stronger is target for these forces.
Imagine the strength it takes to resist this luring machine! Imagine the bravery of that student, willing to chance a longer night, a more difficult process, perhaps even a worse grade, for the sake of learning itself. Honestly ask yourself: would you have passed that test as an 18 year old student in college? Would you pass that test now?
I am reminded of Odysseus and the Lotus Eaters. Odysseus and crew are offered a life of total ease, freedom from want and desire, freedom from agency; immortality. His men fall for the trap, but Odysseus is a hero because he rejects the life of forgetfulness, the life where everything is off of your mind, in favor of the life of a human. To choose to be human is heroic.
These machines offer themselves up as convenient shortcuts, labor saving devices, but they are not providing convenience; they are devouring agency. For my student, the reading and the paper are both opportunities for him, the author, and I to engage in thought together. The machines are not built to let that happen. They need the student to not learn, they need his mind to remain exactly as it is, but with his will eroded. The machines cannot be described properly as wanting anything, to want implies they have desire. But they act as if they are hungry for the meat of our agency.
Over time, the muscle of agency will atrophy. I feel this already happening to me. The algorithms that dominate my information experience have made it more difficult for me to engage with human thought. I miss the algorithm when I am without it. It's harder for me to read a newspaper now. It's harder to read a book. I feel my mind duller--my soul less bright-- the more I have steeped in these diabolical content-swamps. I am terrified that I am too late, but I believe too much in my student, the hero, to give up on my mind. I believe we have a birthright to write reality, to join God in creation by naming the animals. But I also believe there are forces, predators, who follow us like a cloud of mosquitos. How we respond to these forces is the question facing us as we enter into this new age. They want our agency, and they will bleed any bit of exposed skin.