Yet this situation has major implications for culture and societies. <\/p>\n
It\u2019s easy to envision a future where AI dependency leads to intellectual conformity and the erosion of critical thinking. Researchers are already documenting these effects<\/a>, which threaten to render the hard work of wrestling with ideas a lost art<\/a>.<\/p>\n This is why I think it\u2019s critical for educators to confront AI head-on. The key, I believe, is teaching students to distinguish AI\u2019s pattern recognition skills<\/a> from its inability to daydream, inhabit human perspectives and authentically express itself.<\/p>\n Tell me what you think<\/p>\n In a course I recently taught on Southern Gothic literature, I gave my students an exercise. They were tasked with prompting AI to analyze the \u201cemotional atmosphere\u201d of a scene from Carson McCullers\u2019 1940 novel \u201cThe Heart is a Lonely Hunter<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n Many of the characters readers meet in Southern Gothic works<\/a> like McCullers\u2019 are freakish and brutal. Rendered from a distorted, unnatural lens, they speak in odd dialects and conjure what Flannery O\u2019Connor<\/a> called the \u201cgrotesque<\/a>.\u201d They live in isolated places that are stuck in the past and, to use another term of O’Connor\u2019s, are \u201cChrist-haunted<\/a>.\u201d <\/p>\n Many readers have difficulty synthesizing the strange worlds of these characters. AI has an even harder time generalizing the complex tensions between faith and unbelief, or good and evil, that animate these stories.<\/p>\n Carson McCullers. To limit the range of responses and allow useful comparisons, I provided students with scenes involving the main characters of the novel. One of them was the heartrending sequence in which Spiros Antonapoulos, a deaf character, is sent away to a state insane asylum, leaving his only friend, John Singer, behind.<\/p>\n The scene carries a palpable sense of dread and sadness. Further, it invokes righteous anger toward Antonapoulos\u2019 cousin for sending him away \u2013 a decision driven by convenience and based on a misunderstanding of Spiros\u2019 struggles as deviant, antisocial behavior. That he is from an immigrant background living in small-town Georgia gives the scene an even sharper edge.<\/p>\n ChatGPT, however, rendered the scene using sterile, abstract terminology. To pull a representative response that one of my students shared: \u201cThe atmosphere is devastatingly lonely and suspended in time. The scene feels quiet, helpless and emotionally one-sided. There is no dramatic farewell; instead, the moment is marked by Singer\u2019s silent anguish. The train\u2019s departure symbolizes irreversible separation.\u201d<\/p>\n The assessment is clinical and cold. It fails to capture the weight of deep sadness that exudes from the separation of two friends who have only each other. It included a factual mistake, too: It\u2019s a bus, not a train, that pulls away.<\/p>\n Also missing is any clear acknowledgment of Singer\u2019s fear for the horrors in store for Antonapoulos, and the dramatic irony created by Antonapoulos\u2019 own seeming obliviousness to how his life is being upended. AI simply lacks the lived experience to become contextually aware<\/a> in ways that allow it to truly understand McCullers\u2019 haunting novel.<\/p>\n Because AI largely functions as an optimization engine<\/a> \u2013 relying on synthesizing vast amounts of online data and summarizing the results \u2013 its analyses of this scene and others were consistently shallow; they \u201clacked depth\u201d and were filled with \u201cvague platitudes,\u201d as two students put it. <\/p>\n Accessing the embodied experience<\/p>\n Next, I asked my students to have AI generate \u201ca new scene involving at least three characters\u201d of their choosing.<\/p>\n The creative output was even more soulless. Students were especially amused that AI had John Singer, who acts as a hub connecting all the other characters, speaking on a variety of subjects. The problem, of course, is that Singer, like Antonapoulos, is also deaf. <\/p>\n Alan Arkin plays John Singer in the 1968 film adaptation of \u2018The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.\u2019 That AI could not fathom the experience of being unable to hear isn\u2019t surprising. It\u2019s important to remember that engaging with AI means dealing with a synthetic intelligence<\/a> that lacks a body through which to experience and interact with the world.<\/p>\n Without an embodied presence it cannot put itself in the shoes of its users and experience anything approaching human empathy. While tech billionaires such as Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen may see empathy and introspection as weaknesses<\/a>, those traits are the beating heart of literature and art, the wellspring of creativity and human connection.<\/p>\n In other words, emotion, empathy and irrationality could be seen as some of the most powerful counterweights to AI.<\/p>\n Embracing human frailty<\/p>\n There may be situations where AI may be useful to my students, and I think efforts to ban the use of AI<\/a> are unfeasible and counterproductive. <\/p>\n The ability to forgo these tools altogether is largely a luxury. Just as many people can\u2019t afford to have someone else clean their homes, landscape their yards or nanny their kids, those struggling to make ends meet may need to lean on AI assistance<\/a>.<\/p>\n But my hope is that my students \u2013 especially when it comes to their intellectual work \u2013 will understand that deploying the technology requires abandoning capacities that are essential to human thought and creativity: imagination, intuition and self-reflection.<\/p>\n I want them to think twice before trying to mask, with a chatbot, the inherent frailties, weaknesses, obsessions and digressions of the human mind. Instead, I want them to embrace these human tendencies and surrender to what poet William Wordsworth called the \u201cspontaneous overflow of powerful feelings<\/a>.\u201d <\/p>\n After all, the greatest art often emerges from those who are at their most vulnerable, confused and lost.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s disconcerting to envision human thought becoming redundant or deemed inferior due to advancements in artificial intelligence. But…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":591732,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[345,343,344,85,46,125],"class_list":["post-591731","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/591731","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=591731"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/591731\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/591732"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=591731"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=591731"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=591731"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Black](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/file-20260817-60-6elr37.jpg\")
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\n AP Photo<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Movie](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/file-20260817-69-uclkfj.png\")
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\n Warner Bros.<\/a><\/p>\n