Aaron MacLean
I have a warning for you. There is a conspiracy afoot in the land, targeting all of us. The computers in our pockets and the screens all around us have for years paired incredible access to all the world’s information with increasingly ruthless attacks on our capacity for focus, or for what some call ‘deep work’. That’s old news. We all fight this battle every day and it’s important to develop techniques to win it.
But there’s something new under the sun that is far more destructive – and especially for you, the young, who are still in the thick of education, perfecting the ability to reason and really (shocking as it may seem) just at the start of a journey of serious reading and writing that will ultimately reveal, in ten years or so, the questions you ought to be asking.
About ten years after that, you’ll begin to have some tentative and decent answers to those questions, the implications and consequences of which you’ll then spend the rest of your life working out. (Or you could work faster than me, I suppose!)
Of course, I’m talking about AI – specifically, LLMs, or Large Language Models, and the ways in which students use them. The situation overall is serious like a heart attack—or, maybe more appropriately, like a stroke, because the threat is to your mind. And it is a deadly threat. The life of your mind is at stake.
Let me explain.
One of the most depressing conversations I’ve had in the last year was with a former colleague of mine at the United States Naval Academy who now occupies a position of real responsibility at that school. This person is a brilliant, cultured, well-meaning patriot who only wants the best for the young officers in training there. I was genuinely shocked when this person told me that humanities departments at Annapolis would be incorporating the use of AI into class writing. After all, the students were all using AI for assignments anyway, and would be ‘writing’ this way when they got out into the world, so the practice may as well be brought into the light. The students should, as it were, train as they fight.
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