AI Screening Literacy
It is ever so predictable. You read a couple of first lines from a tired college student who resorted to ChatGPT to write the answer to a question.
It looks like this:
General paragraph of introduction, which usually regurgitates the original question.
Balanced, ever so perfectly balanced paragraphs. Maybe a listicle with numbering, if appropriate.
At the conclusion you can expect a wreath of lines totally aligned with the introduction. It says nothing you did not know before asking.
Boring. Plain boring.
Amazingly enough, tired students still resort to it. Being tired is probably the number one threat to creativity. So much so, that you cannot judge how predictable AI can be. So you rinse, wash and repeat. Copy&paste.
Time magazine said it plainly: mediocrity.
The real danger to human creativity that these tools represent is the mechanization of human innovation. Relying on these tools will discourage us from looking beyond what has been done before, and further reduce innovation into no more than imitative remixing.
Sometimes when I open up my blog editor I wonder whether I am being original. Perhaps someone else has discussed the blog entry topic before. Yet, that is not the point. Even if my thoughts are not original, the wording, the particular filter my collection of learning experiences will reflect and project on it is bound to be unique.
I just hope I always keep writing in a way that no verifying or captcha system is needed to prove this post has been written by a human.
There is more to chew on in that article:
Can we recognize the loss of creativity caused by AI as it’s happening? Do we know there is less that is truly new in the world, and fewer avenues for personal expression? Many of us may not. Absence of choice is hard to sense, and mechanization’s real innovation is in creating a complacent buyer with reduced expectations. Once you’ve done that, you can sell them whatever you want. What is being mechanized by AI is our tastes—our ability to discern quality (or originality) at all.
That is the description of a new, I would call AI Screening Literacy we need from now on. That tired student of mine needs to know they are sending a loser piece. They should be able to tell the difference instantly.
How do I teach my students that? So far, when I hand the work back, what I do is to make a brief general comment pointing out that the writing voice lacks personal engagement. The operative word is engagement (a.k.a passion), as opposed to compliance (i.e., getting it done willy-nilly). No one writes back to ask me how they could improve it next time. That's a hint. I guess they understood.
There is no intelligence in AI. The "artificial" bit overrides centuries of passionate evolution in human intelligence.
It's about time we found a new, more accurate name for it. We never called a calculator "intelligent". The term "intelligent" would be delusionary. How about a plain descriptive term such as, artificial language editor, ALE?
"Intelligence" entails learning. "Learning" entails passion. Humanness entails "unpredictability".
That's the beauty AI still lacks.
Labels: AI, creativity, writing
