Generative AI Pushes Outcome Over Process (And This Is Why I Hate It)

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. 

The Constraints-Based Approach to Teaching in the Classroom

If you read this and think 'hey, this sounds like something they do in [insert teaching method here]', please let me know. I've had some chats about the Montessori method, and there's certainly overlap there. But I'm on the hunt for a literature I can connect to, and any help would be appreciated.

I've been thinking a lot about education lately. I'm home-schooling the kids, I've been chatting a lot with coaches about ecological approaches to their teaching (most publicly here and here), and I'm reading Tim Ingold's Anthropology And/As Education. I'm also wondering why the demonstrated success of the ecological dynamics approach in sports pedagogy has had zero consequences for education more broadly. 

I think a couple of things. I think the reason why ecological dynamics hasn't spilled over is that we live in a dualist world where knowledge and physical skills are two distinct domains (think about how physical education is treated in schools). I also think that because the ecological approach doesn't endorse that dualism, there is simply no reason for classroom education to work completely differently from physical education. And finally, I think this might be really, really important.

I used to teach a module called Foundation Research Methods, and after a while I finally realised that I was teaching it in a constraints-based, ecological dynamics style. (This explains why a lot of my colleagues were genuinely confused by what I was doing at times, I think!). The module developed over the years, and the last year I taught it we solved our attendance problem and the students crushed the exam. 

I want to walk through what I did, and reflect on how it embodied an ecological approach. This is not me saying this is how all classes should be taught. This is just me laying out what a constraints-based approach looked like in the class, what I thought worked, and what I would like to have done next.