The loss that he describes is deeper and more existential than anything academic integrity can protect: a specific, if perhaps decaying, way of being among students and their teachers. “AI has already changed the classroom into something I no longer recognize,” he told me. In this view, AI isn’t a harbinger of the future but the last straw in a profession that was almost lost already, to funding collapse, gun violence, state overreach, economic decay, credentialism, and all the rest. New technology arrives on that grim shore, making schoolwork feel worthless, carried out to turn the crank of a machine rather than for teaching or learning.
Under capitalism school is not about growing as a person or expensive human knowledge. It's about creating a productive workforce that is able to reliably crank out the desired output. Students are not there to learn, they're there to get a job that will make them as comfortable as possible. If a chatbot can help them achieve that they will use it because that's the way the system is set up.
The AI in schools debate has some of the characteristics of boomers who are mad that kids don't learn cursive anymore but it also touches on some real concerns about how easy access to the bullshit machine prevents students from learning the basics necessary to actually use the bullshit machine for useful things.
I don't know what the right solution is but I believe schools will have to accept large language models as a fact and teach students about their strengths and weaknesses so they know how to use them properly. Maybe the days of big written exams where students are graded on a scale for their ability to produce a formulaic paper are ending as machines are able to do that now.
Really, A.I. only threatens one specific mode of schoolwork: writing papers. There’s so many other ways to show you’ve learned the material. Of course writing itself is a critical for everyone to learn, but maybe you have to limit it to in-person short essays during class time.
Mostly this will just be something that kicks their teeth in down the line. Cheating is always an option, but then you are just learning to cheat, not learning the material, and everything is always cumulative for knowledge in most classes. If you don't get the basics, you won't even know how to create the correct questions to generate a good response to more complicated topics, or even know if the response generated makes any sense.