‘I wish I could push ChatGPT off a cliff’: professors scramble to save critical thinking in an age of AI
TL;DR
As AI has upended the way students learn, academics worry about the future of the humanities - and society at large Lea Pao, a professor of literature at Stanford University, has been experimenting with ways to get her students to learn offline. She has them memorize poems, perform at recitation events, look at art in the real world. It’s an effort to reconnect them to the bodily experience of learning, she said, and to keep them from turning to artificial intelligence to do the work for them. “There’s no AI-proof anything,” Pao said. “Rather than policing it, I hope that their overall experiences in this class will show them that there’s a way out.” Continue reading...
Nauti's Take
Professors clutching their pearls while students discover AI is just the latest chapter in the eternal panic about new tech killing thought. Spoiler: written language didn't make memory atrophy, and Google didn't kill research skills.
Pao's approach - teaching students there's a 'way out' of AI dependency - is the only play that actually works. Stop fighting the tool, teach when to use it.
Sources