Today’s Plan:
- Review Mollick Responses
- Emerging Research Topics
- For Next Session
Review Mollick Responses
Someone wrote:
“That is our responsibility: to make sure AI stays a tool for humans to improve our lives and not turn into gods made of wires and code.”
Great sentence. As a theorist, my work looks at human desire for certainty, and the dangers that it causes for other people. A former mentor of mine, Victor Vitanza, once wrote: “we are never at home in our whirl/world of language. Any and every attempt to assume that we are has or will have created for human beings dangerous situations.”
That desire for certainty can manifest in many forms: in a notion of God (not all forms of religious are dangerous in this way, but some are) or Reason (the 19th century testifies to how intellectual transcendence can translate directly into genocide) or Utopia (I had a friend who used to joke “tell me what your perfect world looks like. Now tell me how many people we have to kill to make it happen”).
AI might promise a kind of technocratic Reason-Utopia that would realize much of Vitanza’s fears. It would dictate one world of truth against which all others would be judged.
Emerging Research Topics
As I went through the responses, I tried to keep track of potential research areas. Here’s a preliminary list:
- AI and Creativity
- AI and Government Oversight / Corporate Oversight / Universal Income [Do we trust corporations to have our best interests at heart? How do we address the job market / economy of the future? How can/should we regulate AI?]
- AI and Education [benefits, distinguishing productive use vs cheating]
- AI and Alignment [Whose Values Get Coded?
Snippets:
On education, someone wrote:
I’m working towards being a special education teacher, and depending on what level of special education I teach I understand that I might have students who use AI as a shortcut for their own learning.
Which makes me ask: how do we draw the line between AI as an aid and AI as a shortcut?
Someone else wrote:
Although, I have used AI more creatively. Sometimes, I will play around with visual AI and type in silly prompts like, “a pink dolphin jumping out of the water” just to see what a pink dolphin would look like. Or when SnapChat came out with “My AI” I played around with it and asked it random questions just to see what it would respond with. My major is Elementary Education, so I don’t feel particularly threatened by AI, but I am nervous that my students may tend to use it in the future. I know that K-6 students might not use it as much as a student at the high school level might use it, but it is still a worry of mine.
Hmm.
On creativity, someone wrote:
There are lots of people in the world who use AI to make various forms of art and then either pass it off as their own or argue that AI does it better than humans, making artists obsolete. I’m attending UNC to study Art Education with the plan of becoming an elementary school art teacher, so potentially AI could take over my future job. I think AI is a unique tool that can be helpful for a lot of things, and I have used it for help with a lot of things, but the idea of using it to take people out of certain fields of work is terrible.
Which led me to ask: “I’d be really curious: what do you see as the value of making art? How do you defend taking hours to make a painting vs taking minutes to have an AI generate that painting for you?” Notice that I’m asking someone to define a foundational postulate (learning to make art has value because…).
Notice, too, that I am not addressing the other argument. Because there is two arguments kind of mashed together here. That’s fine! Writing, drafting, responding is messy work. But as we revise, and as we develop a research question, we need to pull them apart. The first concerns creativity in the way I have presented it above. The second concerns employment–those concerns are also valid! But I would not try to write a paper that explores both of those things at once.
For Next Session
Read one of the following:
- “Excuse Me, Is There AI in That?” [On Creativity]
- “AI is dangerous, but not for the reasons you think” [On potential need for regulations]
- Human-Centered AI Guidance for K-12 Public Schools / Implementing AI: A Practical Guide for the Classroom
- “How OpenAI is trying to make ChatGPT safer and less biased” [Alignment, Values]
AI needs regulation, but what kind, and how much?- California Legislature Approves Bill Proposing Sweeping A.I. Restrictions
