We are rapidly learning to live with AI. Or at least, we find ourselves living with it, whether we are learning to or not.<\/p>\n
It pops up in our email applications, when we press reply, offering us supposed alternative ways of responding to emails (\u201cThanks, will do\u201d \u2013 \u201cTell me more\u201d \u2013 \u201cSorry to hear\u201d).<\/p>\n
At first, I was astounded. \u201cSomeone is reading my emails,\u2019\u2019\u00a0I told my students. I want to compose my own discourse, thanks very much. It\u2019s what we\u2019re here for.<\/p>\n
Fancy having so little pride (or possibly, confidence) in your ability to say what you mean \u2013 or having so little idea what you mean \u2013 that you are grateful for such short-cuts.<\/p>\n
Fancy fobbing off anyone with so little of your mind or heart. Fancy convincing yourself that you\u2019ve better things to do than to think, and imagine and treat other people with dignity.<\/p>\n
I\u2019d like to know what those better things are.<\/p>\n
AI\u00a0now also pops up, uninvited, when we do a Google search, using precious real-world resources like water and energy to provide amazing answers to \u201cquestions\u201d that are frequently fatuous \u2013 and that we have quickly accustomed ourselves to asking just because we can.<\/p>\n
As we learn about AI, if we do \u2013 rather than just holding our noses and jumping in \u2013 we should quickly perceive that there are many activities in which short-cuts are unnecessary, inappropriate \u2013 or worse.<\/p>\n
At one level, AI\u00a0is just another piece of machinery, sold in order to make money, and that we should be asking ourselves whether we can, in fact, manage perfectly well without.<\/p>\n
Take, for an offline example, something as simple as using a leaf-blower rather than, say, a rake. A leaf-blower costs more than a rake, it wastes petrol, it makes noise, it breaks down more readily, it shifts the problem rather than solving it, and raking requires strategic craft and delivers bodily exercise.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s no contest. But we love these things.<\/p>\n
University lecturers are now impelled by management to use online technologies called Learning Management Systems.<\/p>\n
Last year the brand name was Blackboard, this year it\u2019s Brightspace. For some reason I keep calling it Blackspace.<\/p>\n
Managing the Learning Management System is actually more onerous (and far less interesting and rewarding) than managing my subject and my students. I\u2019m very tempted to return to assessing by pen and paper.<\/p>\n
Why are we as a species attracted \u2013 even, fatally attracted \u2013 to doing things in costly, mechanised ways, and to taking perceived short-cuts?<\/p>\n
These are not questions for AI\u00a0but for psychologists. Or theologians.<\/p>\n
Certainly there are realms of knowledge where we should not hesitate to use AI.\u00a0If medical researchers could deploy AI\u00a0to discover a cure for cancer, or engineers to make safer cars, bridges or buildings, or to send Elon Musk and his acolytes to another planet, who could object?<\/p>\n
But it\u2019s different, or should be, on my side of the campus.<\/p>\n
The humanities \u2013 art, music, philosophy or literature \u2013 are not about solving problems or producing perfect answers to straightforward questions.<\/p>\n
Hamlet solves nothing. A great novel, movie, or piece of music is not an answer to anything.<\/p>\n
We pursue these disciplines, and the cultural artifacts and bodies of discourse they study, for other reasons \u2013 reasons that themselves are difficult to express, but emerge in the pursuit.<\/p>\n
I study the things I study \u2013 and teach the things I teach \u2013 so that my students and I, as individuals, may expand our minds and sympathies by grasping, extending and enhancing human experience; so that we may exercise our faculties of memory, thought and imagination.\u00a0So that we might enter more deeply into the human condition.<\/p>\n
We can\u2019t do this by digital proxy.<\/p>\n
So, I tell my own students that I don\u2019t want perfect essays from them: there are thousands of perfect essays, and now we can get new ones at the press of a button.<\/p>\n
What I want are their own essays: their own unique engagements with the subject of study. I have<\/p>\n
no interest in teaching on any other terms.<\/p>\n
I want my students to demonstrate that they have internalised a body of knowledge, that they can think for themselves, that they will be equipped by education to perpetuate and contribute to human culture.<\/p>\n
My friend Tom, habitual devil\u2019s advocate and who has a trained AI\u00a0chatbot named Claude, put it to me \u2013 playing to my known tastes \u2013 \u201cWe\u2019ve only got 41 symphonies by Mozart. Wouldn\u2019t it be cool if A.I. could produce more symphonies that you couldn\u2019t tell from Mozart\u2019s?\u201d<\/p>\n
He\u2019s right, I couldn\u2019t tell: I love music, but not like an expert. For me, part of the point and the joy of Mozart\u2019s symphonies is that they were written by a creature of my species, sharing my DNA and \/or the imago Dei: a fallible, human genius named Mozart.<\/p>\n
The same applies to all the products of the humanities. We are not trying to fix things, but to enhance, and find beauty and meaning, in human experience. Artificiality won\u2019t do that.<\/p>\n
Dr Paul Tankard is an associate Professor of English, University of Otago,\u00a0and director of the Otago Centre For\u00a0The Book.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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