I will always remember the 2023 school year as the year technology gave birth to AI. Sure, it has been present and growing and expanding for decades, but this is the year it was born into everyday life.
I am an English Language Arts teacher and have been for 27 years now, with the past six years as a virtual instructor full-time. As you would imagine, I have daily interactions with students who turn in essays. I’ll leave it there for now and come back to it.
To be clear, this is not meant as some kind of warning about AI. George Orwell did that in his novel, 1984. It might be worth your time to read that short novel if you haven’t. Also, I in no way deny that AI has made my life feel smoother. Although I had no clue at the time, I now know that AI that started intercepting spam phone calls and texts for me. We have all felt that satisfaction that comes with our music choices being personalized. And, every time we hit ‘agree, agree, agree’, to get into a website or app, we put our stamp of approval on AI. We are saying: sure take my information, for what it’s worth. (At least that’s ONE thing we are agreeing to in that case.) Ai is nothing new. It is a tool. But it has evolved into a bit of a nemesis because it is a tool that mimics how to be human.
So what is the deal? Humans have to explore their boundaries. That’s what makes us human. Very few of us would be satisfied to say “Sure we can find a technology to eradicate cancer, but who wants that?” We are human, we expand before we deteriorate, whether we like it or not (I’m referring to the physics law of entropy here). I think humans have a biological secret: We grow, and we grow by creating tools. Ai is a tool.
At the moment, I seem to have a series of sentences, lacking fluency and grace, listing my thoughts about ai. But because I feel I have something to say about the topic, I will be back and I will apply sandpaper and continue crafting, the old fashioned way. I won’t ask AI to write this for me because AI has a very clear voice, and I don’t like it at all.
In my mind, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has a face, and this is it. While the nose here is mangled and the face is kind of hairy, this rock expresses AI’s personality in my mind. It’s The Joker, in early phases of finding his voice. I will have more to say on this, soon.
On top of that, there are a few songs from the seventies that portend the coming of ai. If you don’t love AC/DC, you might want to mute your sound. You can read the captions that describe AI.