30 November 2022 saw the launch of Chat GPT and ever since pundits the world over have filled various commentaries either with starry-eyed praise of these technologies as they proport to usher in the dawning of a new era of peace and progress, or of woeful warnings concerning the immanent of the end of humanity as we know it. Even trying to avoid hyperbole, it is evident that the development and proliferation of Large Language Models, so-called ‘Artificial Intelligence’ (A.I.), does constitute something of a crisis, inasmuch as such phenomena press on precisely what it is that is said to distinguish the human person from other creatures, namely rationality. And so, in the spirit of not squandering the crisis, that I am suggesting attention be paid to the questions which this new technology raises.
Now it might be because I am a father of young children and thus vocationally bound to be considering these questions, or because I am a ‘professional educator’, but it seems to me that the questions concerning so-called artificial intelligence take on a particular acuity when addressed within the context of discussions concerning education. And yet it is precisely within this context that serious thought is apparently lacking.
In the realm of education, the ubiquity of LLMs is all but complete (with some hopeful exceptions). The largely uncritical adoption of these technologies across schools and universities, indeed whole sectors across the industry, would be staggering if we’d not previously seen school administrators falling over themselves to issue each child with a personal device—as Michael Hanby writes, “surely the worst idea in a field that is littered with bad ideas”—or to have their institution named as an ‘Apple Distinguished’ or ‘Microsoft Showcase’ School, effectively selling a lifetime of custom from each of their students to these multinational tech giants.
The proliferation of LLMs and their capacity to ape what many consider to be fundamentally and exclusively human traits (i.e. thinking, learning, educating, caring, etc.) should spur us on to ask increasingly basic questions concerning human nature. And yet the creepily humanizing manner with which peddlers of so-called A.I. speak of their product effectively occludes our capacity to think seriously about such things. The example of Microsoft’s new “A.I. Teaching Assistant” is illustrative here. In what one would hope was an ironic nod of the head to George Orwell the program, hideously named ‘Nurture’, claims to mimic the style and tone of the teacher so as to provide ‘personalised’ feedback to students in ‘real time’. In the words of Saint Paul: ‘The whole world groans’ [Rom. 8:22].
It will surprise no one when we awake in a year or two’s time (perhaps sooner) to see classes taught according LLM generated scripts, accompanied by assessments being set by LLM generated machines to assess LLM generated learning outcomes. Such assessments will be completed by students bereft of any reason not to substitute LLM generated slop for their own compositions. Teachers will then employ the LLM to mark these assessments providing ‘rigorous and personalised feedback’ generated by the LLM, none of which will be read by the student or their parents. The cycle will be complete. Much ‘work’ will be done, much time will be ‘saved’, but nothing will be achieved. Nothing will be learned. Nobody will have grown.
The development and the proliferation of LLMs constitutes something of a crisis for our understanding of what it is to be human, and the localizing of these questions in realm of education—which functions as something of a microcosm—is a useful way of approaching the subject. The language of crisis is too easily dismissed as hyperbolic or alarmist, but I am using it in its etymological sense, as discussed by Fr Luigi Giussani. The word crisis, as Giussani points out, (from the Greek krisis) means to grasp the reasons, become aware of the reasons, and therefore the limitations or the lack of limitations of a proposal—thus, the provocation of this new technology should be for us an opportunity to verify not just what it is that we are doing in education (though indeed it should certainly do that!) but to verify and test what it is that we think that we are as human beings.
It will not do to unthinkingly reject anything new simply because of its perceived novelty, nor should we hold to an ideological primitivism or luddism; but neither should we be swept up in enthusiasms for progress for its own sake, or the kind of technocratic power that Pope Francis warns us against. Instead, the development and the proliferation of the LLM, precisely because of its seeming success in aping human intelligence—what it is that is supposed to be what separates us from the animals—should be the stimulus of genuine thought, of real effort to seek to understand what it is that makes us human; what is the nature of intelligence; and what it is to love and be loved.
