I really hate generative AI, because there are many reasons to hate it. It's abilities depend on stolen data; it uses so much electricity it's messing with climate goals and made them restart 3 Mile Island; it's riddled with all the biases you'd expect; and the sales pitch from companies with billions of dollars on the line has smelled of snake oil from day one.
I'm also mad at it for professional reasons.
First, I am an ecological psychologist, so I have things to say about whether these systems can be intelligent. They can't: they are made only of language, and intelligence is made of much more than this. Also their basic trick (unreflective extrapolation of the next most likely thing to say) isn't even how language works, let alone intelligence.
But second, for the purposes of this post, I am mostly mad about it as an educator. My students are deluged with AI tools. Grammarly relies on it; Adobe keeps trying to summarise pdfs for them; and ChatGPT promises to help them write better essays. My students are busy and stressed: they're often working jobs to support themselves, and their courses ask a lot of them too. We know they take shortcuts, and AI is the most powerful one they've ever had access to. Universities are busy drafting and redrafting policy documents about fair use of AI, because we have no way to enforce a ban on its use, but even these documents accept the flawed premise at the heart of the promises these technologies make.
The flawed premise is this: AI technology is based on the idea that the important part of creating things is the outcome, not the process. Can't draw? That shouldn't stop you from making a picture. Worried about your writing? Why should that stop you from handing in a coherent essay? The ads for AI all promise that you'll be able to produce things without all the tedious work of actually producing it - isn't that great?
Well no, it's not - it's terrible. It betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of why creating things has value. It's terrible in general, but I am especially offended by this idea in the context of education, and in this post I want to lay this idea out in a little detail.