More Than Words

grade school. It's just that we have gotten away  from these values around writing and so that it feels groundbreaking is really ironic to me, given  that I think they're fundamental, but we have to agree at the values level that these things are  fundamental, otherwise we will be stuck in the same rut we've had, only now we're letting ChatGPT  solve these problems for us, rather than making students write these sorts of formulaic essays. I also went through a school system where there

had been no discussion of a five-paragraph essay.  I didn't run into that until some colleagues started talking about how students were not very  good at writing these five-paragraph essays. And I wondered where that whole concept came from,  because I remember when I was moving through, a little bit earlier than either of you were, but  we had a wide variety of writing assignments, and

we also did an awful lot of reading. And one thing  that I think has been lost along with a decline in writing or with a shorter form more formulaic  writing, is that students are not asked to read as much, and I think that's also been affecting  their ability to write, because engaging with multiple styles of text in reading can be really  helpful in developing as a writer yourself.

It's absolutely necessary. Reading and writing  are inextricably related to each other, like the skill of interpreting reading across all  kinds of different genres is the internalizing of the message. Like this is how this is delivered,  and then we're going to do this in turn. We are of a certain age. Those of us who are of a certain  age did not encounter the five paragraph essay. My first encounter was in high school when I  was taking AP classes, and I was coached to

use this form to pass the AP assessment. And  my first thought was, “Well, this is dumb, like this is the easiest thing I'm going to do all  year is write these AP essays.” And indeed, they

were. I dedicate Why They Can't Write: Killing  the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities to my actual grade school teachers, because in  hindsight, I realized how fortunate I was by the accident of my birth and my parents to grow up  in a Chicago suburb and go to my neighborhood grade school at a time where the teachers were  given the freedom to engage their students,

and I still have my fifth grade writing portfolio  that my mom saved. If this was a visual podcast I would show it, but it's called 12 stories, and  it's laminated construction paper cover tied together with hole punches, tied together with  yarn binding. And if you look at those artifacts, none of them are a five-paragraph essay. They  are all in some way asking me to solve a writing

problem in a rhetorical situation. There's  the classic Thanksgiving assignment where you draw a picture of a turkey by tracing your  hand and decorate it, and then for each letter of Thanksgiving, like T, H, A, et cetera, you have  to give something you're thankful about. There's a limerick. There's a haiku. There is a number  of different genres of fiction, science fiction, historical fiction, which required us to read  those forms, to understand them, and then produce

them in the image of the original form. This  one totally cracks me up. There is a classified ad that you would read in a newspaper for my  skateboard. And so it's like “Used skateboard, blue works good. $2 or best offer.” Actually, it  doesn't say “or best offer.” It says “OBO,” which is the shorthand you would use in a classified ad  at the time, because you paid by the word. That is

rhetorical problem solving, that is internalizing  how to think about audience as you write. This was fifth grade, and sometimes I can't believe what  we've done to students in the name of helping them try to prepare them for quote, unquote, college  and career. We've really, in a lot of cases, done the opposite. And I know it doesn't need to  be this way, because I lived through a different

time. I know something else used to be done. When  I wrote Why They Can't Write and went back and did all kinds of research, and I found articles  dating back to when I was in grade school and middle school about some of the things I would  later do that don't help you learn to write, things like diagramming sentences, which is  a valuable exercise in critical thinking, but

doesn't help you learn how to write or research  papers. There's a report from 1984 by this guy, Richard Larson, who wrote about how asking  students to do research papers in high school is a fake genre, because you can't actually ask  high schoolers to do a research paper. Now, if the goal is to help us learn to use the library, or  the card catalog at the time, that kind of stuff,

that's one thing. But if you think they're doing  research, you're kidding yourself. And these are the things we need to know so we know what are  students actually experiencing when we ask them to write in our classes. We have to think through  that. It doesn't mean that we should abandon whole genres or not have them do things ChatGPT can  do, but if we're going to ask them to do it,

it has to be rooted in something meaningful. And  to your point about reading, my superpower, which I don't think of as a superpower, because it's  just been something I've been able to do since I was quite young, is reading texts for extended  periods of time. It helps me with concentration,

helps with my mood, it helps me learn things.  And the fact that we have allowed school to get away from that clearly important underlying skill,  which is also a practice, which also has habits, which also has attitude, also has knowledge  involved, is sort of tragic, and it's a real heavy lift to get away from it. But it is, I  think, like the thing honestly, to tackle if

we're going to help students become the kind of  people they wish to be. Like, honestly, I think if we still read whole books, the distractions of  cell phones and these things we argue about would be significantly less. Like, don't get me wrong,  I can be distracted by my cell phone like anybody, but I also know how to put my cell phone away and  get lost in a writing or reading task for hours

at a time, because I have that embedded in my  practice. If students have never had that in their practice, and we're asking them to suddenly engage  in this behavior, we're looking at trouble Reflecting a little bit on your portfolio, John,  and I'm thinking about the one that I also have from fifth grade, except at that time, I think  I was also really exploring my design skills, because it's hard bound… Wow. …and I made a full cover and bound the  edges with thread, and all the things,.

That’s awesome, I mean my fifth grade portfolio  is shameful because I had horrible handwriting. I always got “needs improvement on my  handwriting” in my report cards and my artistic abilities are non existent, so  that part is awful. But to your point, the opportunity to engage in even that relatively  small instance of self expression in the context of something you did in school just strikes me as  vanishingly rare in today's culture of schooling,

and not for the better in any way. I was also reflecting on your mention of reading to change your mood, and I'm realizing how much  I've really read since the beginning of this year, probably for the same reason. You argue in your  book that ChatGPT just does text generation and not writing, because writing involves  thinking and feelings. How do we convey this to our students and maybe to our colleagues? Yeah, the only way to do this is to experience it

for yourself. And my hope is somebody teaching  in higher education, regardless of discipline, has had the experience of writing as thinking,  which I like to talk about as the simultaneous expression of an idea. You're trying to capture  something that's in your head and put on the page, but it is also the exploration of an idea. So  as we are writing, we have this notion that

we're trying to capture, and often that notion  shifts as we are writing. That's the exploration of the idea, and that is by itself, the best and  clearest manifestation of critical thinking that I can imagine. In fact, as the way I assessed  writing evolved, I would have assignments where that was the only criteria. It was have a thought  while you're writing. So the thing students were writing, it wasn't that it was unimportant,  but what they were actually assessed on was

the later reflection about the thought they had  while they were writing. Could they articulate to me the experience of thinking they had while  they were writing this particular artifact, because I knew once that had happened and they had  had that experience, it was something they could return to again and again and again, recognizing  that there's a difference between I'm just sort of going through the motions to get words on a  page to satisfy a grade, and writing as an act of

thinking and development and not only capturing  our thoughts, but developing those thoughts as we go. So that's the only way it can be done.  But if we're going to do it in school, we have

to prioritize it, and in terms of feeling, it's  kind of the same thing. And I write about some of the stuff in my book, where I write about my own  instances of being like, as weird as this sounds, emotionally moved by my own writing, because I'm  conjuring something for myself and my memories or my life that is meaningful to me, but it can  even be something small that upon reflection, we realized this writing was meaningful. I  think I have this anecdote in the book; if not,

I should have put it in there. But it was during  the pandemic, I was grocery shopping and on the floor, and we're supposed to keep our distance and  only go one way in the aisles, it was that period, and on the floor, I saw a yellow post it note  that clearly had somebody's shopping list on it. And I picked it up. It had a bunch of items,  but one of them was “cherry Pop Tarts” in all caps with three exclamation points, underlined, and I  just had this sort of moment to myself. I said,

“those cherry pop tarts are very, very, very  important.” And reflecting on it later, I thought of the person who'd sort of put that notion in the  list writer's mind. But I also thought of the list writer, sort of, particularly at that time… we can  remember how fraught everything felt… going to the grocery store knowing that the central importance  of that mission was to come home with these Cherry Pop Tarts to help soothe the spirit of the  person in their household who needed them. Writing

a grocery list can be an emotional experience  if we attend to it, if we're aware of it. Now, it's not like we can go around 24/7 having  emotions over everything we write. That would be disturbing and inefficient, but everything we  write has that potential, and I think we should

be cognizant of it, and every so often we should  pause and reflect on it. And to the extent that school does not allow room for that, again,  is to wall students off from some important aspect of their intellectual, emotional,  social, let's say even economic development, all these things matter, I think, long term, and  so we should give students a chance to experience them in their education. Because why not? What  else are we doing with our time? If not that?

Along those lines, you'd suggest that pretty much  everything that ChatGPT does is essentially like hallucinations. There's a lot of discussion of  hallucinations in getting things wrong, but you suggest that essentially everything it does is  just predictive text which is devoid of meaning

to the system itself, that it's missing the human  context. One of the things I was thinking about is you also had that example where you mentioned  cinnamon rolls, and that ChatGPT could write about cinnamon rolls, but it wouldn't bring up the same  sort of connotations that people would have with that. What are students missing when they rely on  generative AI to generate writing or to summarize readings that they've been asked to do, which  is an increasingly common use of AI tools.

Yeah, the reading, quote, unquote, I'm going to  put air quotes around reading when you talk about ChatGPT or large language models “reading,” but  that is a burgeoning and worrisome application of this technology. Now it's not like we should  never ask a large language model to summarize a source for us. That may be useful to us, but we  have to be very, very cognizant of the difference

between what a large language model does and what  humans do. When humans read and humans write, we're having an experience, and that experience  is encoded in memory, it involves our senses, it involves sort of a metacognitive process. Large  language models do none of that. They are syntax generators. They can't think, they can't feel,  they can't communicate with intention. So if we're going to outsource that to a syntax generator  operating on probabilities, we have to be aware

of what is being compromised in the exchange.  Now, in some cases, that's fine. If I'm going to go to Wikipedia for something, because I need  some kind of background about a source or an idea or a concept, maybe I'm going to go to ChatGPT  instead, although the risk of hallucination can make that fraught, because Wikipedia, while  it is the product of flawed human beings, has been checked and edited in ways that make it  significantly more reliable than a large language

model. You guys know this, reading is fodder  for writing. So if we're going to need to write, ultimately write about something, failing to  read it leaves me ill equipped to write about it, because the reading itself is where my ideas,  my thoughts are generated. It's sort of ironic that we call this stuff generative AI, because  it really is like reading is truly generative, like it creates the conditions under which our  thoughts can occur. And so I'm disturbed by some

of it. Like, the deep research release that can  supposedly put together a PhD level dissertation is BS. I mean, it really is, the only way you  believe that is if you ignore what it means to write a dissertation. No offense, I've never done  a dissertation. I don't have a PhD. No offense to the dissertation producers out there, we don't  write dissertations solely to be read. In fact, if somebody wants to publish their dissertation  outside of an academic artifact, they have to turn

it into a book. Dissertations are fundamentally  used to demonstrate an extended engagement with

a type of thinking and knowledge creation. And so  when I see somebody on social media saying, use this to generate your dissertation’s literature  review, my top of my head lifts off and my brain orbits around the sun and comes back, because  I cannot believe that this is something anybody would tolerate for a knowledge producing exercise  and industry, and yet, I have seen real academics recommend these behaviors and the imperatives of  speed and efficiency and productivity override

our good sense around what is the meaning behind  what we're trying to actually do. And this is my concern, that speed, efficiency, productivity,  these are not educational values, yet, they are the things that are often valued inside of higher  education institutional frameworks. So all this stuff needs to be examined if we're going to make  truly productive use of this. If it isn't just going to be like I can now churn out six articles  are necessary. I'm going to turn out 600 now,

because I've got my large language model cranking  this up. I just ask folks, “What is the point of all of that extra stuff?” It's just slop. We  don't need more slop. We need good, reliable, thoughtful human products. And I said this at  the top, this is the gift of this technology to help us understand what humans should be  doing, but only if we take advantage of the gift. We could squander it. And in a lot of ways,  I think we are squandering it, unfortunately.

So along the lines of productivity and efficiency,  you do note in your book about automating parts of the writing process, like moving from cursive  writing to typing and word processing are beneficial, including other things in different  processes, like calculators, GPS systems, et cetera. There's ways that technology has  certainly made our lives more efficient. Can you talk a little bit about how ChatGPT  is essentially, fundamentally different

than those other kinds of automations? I have to admit from the outset that even those quote, unquote good automations have trade offs.  I've hugely benefited from these automations in my life and career. Talking earlier about my lousy  handwriting, I really could not begin to write until I learned to type on a manual typewriter  in quote, unquote, summer school in fifth grade, when my parents needed me out of the house and do  something and I took a typing class at the junior

high, typing island photography in fifth grade. It  was great. I loved it, but I really loved typing because that I could do, and I could type so much  faster and with more clarity than I could hand write that I now had a way to capture my thoughts  roughly at the speed with which they occurred. So it was a great boon, and the noise the manual  typewriter made was just a bonus, because it was super fun to hammer away on that thing and  then throw the carriage return across. Nobody's

done it. They should. Go find a manual typewriter  somewhere and spend some time doing that. It is a good time. That said, like, I can't handwrite.  I can't write cursive anymore. I recently had to write a paper check for the first time in  months, and had to rewrite it three times in order to get it legible so somebody could actually  cash my check. So automation is not unalloyed good

without trade offs. That said something like  automating the creation of human writing on a page from cursive to typewriting, doesn't really  alter the underlying labor of what's happening. Now we do know that the typewriter and the word  processor have changed the nature of writing. The existence of cut and paste as a technology that  didn't involve actually cutting paper and pasting paper changed the type of writing that we produce.  So all this stuff is pretty fascinating, if you

start to look at it. The analogy that people have  drawn between the calculator and ChatGPT, it's not that it's entirely unlike that, it's different  from it in some very important ways. The most important difference is that when a calculator  does its mechanical calculations versus a human doing the calculations, that underlying act is  identical. Now a calculator does it differently.

It uses sort of these binary calculation tools to  do it while humans are using our brain, but the end result is identical through those different  mechanisms, and the calculator has the benefit of ,unless we wrongly input a number, of being more  accurate. Now, it doesn't mean we shouldn't still teach addition, subtraction and long division and  this kind of stuff. We still have to be able to

think about numbers in a way that makes  them sensible to us. The difference though, is that a calculator is a labor-saving device for  something that we would do not as well through our own calculation. ChatGPT, as a syntax generator,  is not doing the same thing as human writing.

Human writing is thinking, feeling, communicating.  So when we outsource the production of text to a syntax generator, we are doing something  fundamentally different in the production of that text, and that difference sands away the  most interesting features of writing, which is the demonstration of a sort of spiky human unique  intelligence, which is the thing that ultimately

gets us interested in reading, particular writers  write their unique intelligence. The misfortune of school is that we forgot this in how we assign and  assess student writing, we've asked them to take away their unique intelligence, what they present  to us, so the large language model output looks

a lot like what gets good grades in school or has  gotten good grades in school. But this is just the opportunity of resetting those values and keeping  in mind these differences in the underlying labor is important, because again, if we want students  to learn certain things, like writing, like critical thinking, like active reading, we have to  have them do it. If they don't do it, they can't learn it. We learn through experiences, and if we  outsource some critical part of that experience to

a large language model, we are denying students  the experiences to learn it. One of the early applications of large language models, people  enthused about it, so I'm going to use it to do a first draft, and then I will edit the draft.  This is ass backwards. The first draft is where all the thinking happens. That's the stuff. And so  you can't edit something using your thoughts that

was not produced through thinking. We need to keep  all this stuff in mind as we do it. Otherwise, we're really going to spin our wheels around how  this technology can be genuinely useful, rather than simply as a substitute for the stuff that  we should be doing for ourselves, particularly in learning contexts. I can't say this enough,  like people write me like, “I'll use this for

the marketing copy I write for my business, and  it's fine.” I'm like, “Great, great. That's fine, and that's a great labor-saving device, but  you have to remember all of the stuff you, the adult employed human, had to experience and  learn, the skills, knowledge, attitudes and habits of mind in order to look at that output and say,  ‘This is good,’ that can only be done through writing that cannot be done through becoming  a prompt engineer with large language models.”

I get heated up about this stuff, I’m sorry. You're talking about the sound of the typewriter. Just recently, last week, my mom sent me a little  letter that I had written to Santa when I was

little, and I had asked for a typewriter. We're gonna sound like a bunch of fogies here, but my work set up at my home office, I have a  laptop and I have a large monitor, and because I like two screens, and I actually ordered a special  Bluetooth keyboard for my laptop that was designed to purposely make noise, more like an electric  than a manual, because a manual that really would be something, it was just a noisy mechanical  keyboard. It was very satisfying to use it. I

actually broke it because I worked it too hard,  and the company went out of business. Maybe it wasn't a great product, but I loved it. And loved  it, and I had it while I was writing the book, and my wife would know when I had a good day by  the sounds that had been coming from my office, because it was like, clack, clack, clack,  clack, clack and know if I had a bad day if

it was mostly silent. I mean, this is real, like  the experiences of our lives are our lives, and to the extent that we've sanded those experiences out  of learning in education contexts is just kind of tragic and unnecessary, has no relationship  to how much students learn or the value of their learning. In fact, it's the opposite.  And so I'm a true believer in this stuff.

Going back along the same line, I also, throughout  my elementary school, got comments about my handwriting, and in fact, that continued into the  next generation, because when my son's teacher, and I think it was fourth or fifth grade, was  complaining about his handwriting being illegible, apparently, he brought in something that  he found that I had written at some point, and he said, “See, it's genetic…” but I benefit  a lot, too, from those early automations. Getting

a typewriter was a tremendous improvement in  the ability to express myself more clearly. But then when word processing came out, it changed  the way in which I wrote. Before that, I used to have very elaborate outlines and organized  things very carefully, because there's just so much you can do with Wite-Out and with correction  tape. And my writing was much more efficient when I had the ability to move things around and to  rephrase things and edit it before it finally

was produced as a more final version. And I was  at Stony Brook at the time, where dissertations had to be done on a typewriter, and I wasn't about  to do this was like 180 pages or so with all these math symbols. So I had a typewriter with a daisy  wheel and an RS 232 interface from my computer,

and I connected that to my computer to print  that on a typewriter. It took 12 hours because I had to keep swapping the daisy wheel every  time there were Greek symbols, but I certainly wasn't going to go through and having to type it  page by page, and the ability to edit using Word

Processing made it so much more efficient. But  as you note, students are not getting the same sort of efficiencies when they rely on ChatGPT and  effective writing takes a lot of time and effort and thought and critical thinking, and we're  living in a time where there's so much fake news out there, or distortions of reality, and so many  conspiracy theories and critical thinking skills,

I think, are perhaps more important than they  have been in the more recent past. How can we help students develop those critical thinking  skills when they do rely to such a large extent

on generative AI to get summaries of content. It's a challenge. It's an interesting challenge, and I'm gonna turn listeners on to some  fascinating experiments being done by a guy named Mike Caulfield, who is training large language  models to become essentially fact checkers, particularly around images, because they're  very good at this, because it can compare image

features in ways that humans can't. But the reason  Mike can do this is because he has a career of thinking about the problem of fact checking, of  how we think about information and how we check these things. I really recommend people checking  out his newsletter, because his experiments are fascinating. Still, the only way to become  critical thinkers is to require students to

do a lot of thinking. The absence of thinking from  large language model outputs should be sufficient warning for us to be wary of letting students  use them to bypass parts of the process that may require thinking. Ferreting out misinformation is  a practice. In fact, Mike Caulfield has a previous book called Verified, where he talks about a  SIFT method for helping assess the veracity of

online information. Once you get this method, you  can employ it to help you understand the world, and this is sort of my pitch to students around  writing, is that if they can develop the writing practices, if they can develop their powers of  observation, drawing inferences from observations, and then drawing analytical conclusions from  those inferences, they have a significantly increased ability to just go through the  world, seeing, reading encountering things,

and having that detector that allows them to  say this thing doesn't make sense. But it is something that has to be practiced and experienced  to get good at. And writing is a kind of unique way of being able to do this, because it should  require students to turn all of those senses on, but again, we have to make them do it when the  assignment comes. And then we have to assess the

assignment according to criteria that values  those experiences. More and more as I wrote the book and as I think about the problems, it's  not so much the assignments themselves, although there are some assignments that are just sort of  like we're gonna have to put those away. Those are too vulnerable to the technology, and they're too  uninteresting to students to ask them to do these

things, and so we have to do something else. But  if the assignment is intrinsically interesting and engaging and gets students thinking deeply  about these things, we then have to use assessment criteria that values that, as opposed to surface  level features that so much of student writing is attended to. And some of this also involves  convincing students that this is what we're

going to do. The first part of my first-year  writing courses was always sort of fraught, because students would want to give me what they'd  done before, and they were very conditioned to producing what I called pseudo-academic BS, which  was a sort of high falutin fancy-languaged version of what they thought a smart student who had sort  of read the assignment would sound like on paper, and they had been conditioned to this performance  of good, smart studentness. And one of my rubric

criteria was absence of pseudo-academic BS. And  as soon as I saw it, I would just turn it back to the student and say, this is pseudo-academic  BS, you need to revise, and they hated me for it, absolutely hated me for it, at least at the start.  Some at the end also, but at the end, some would

come around. But this is a reorienting around the  values that we attach to learning, and if students have not been exposed to those values, or if those  things had not been valued in their school context before, we have to help them reorient to them and  not get overly frustrated, as I sometimes would when they're not there already. When they enter my  class and they're not doing the stuff I need them

to do, I have to remember that in a lot of cases,  this was like new, it was unfamiliar. I think I used this analogy in my book, I don't know if I  did or not, but it was like the beagles that had only been raised in a lab and had only experienced  like a cage, and then they took them to a park, and they opened the cage doors and say, “Run,  be free, beagles,” and the beagles are afraid of the grass because it's foreign. Maybe I'm going  to regret reducing students to beagles. It's an

analogy, people. But the idea that we know the  grass is the great thing, and that the beagles who are in the cages are going to love this  grass as soon as they just get to experience it, but they might be afraid of it because it's  unfamiliar, and because the system within which they've been working has been rewarding these  non-grass-like behaviors, they've been rewarding staying in the cage. They've been rewarding  hitting the prescriptions. And so part of my work

was always that reorientation, like “It's okay,  come out of the cage. There's good stuff out here. You might get muddy, you might step in dog crap.  There might be something that doesn't go well, but we're going to be okay, because ultimately on  the other side of this is a genuine experience of learning in life, and you will appreciate this.”  Again, no teacher bats 1000 with their students in the course of the semester. And I think,  like a lot of instructors, I can remember every

horrible end of semester comment a student ever  wrote about me. But overall, the batting average was pretty good because students are thirsty  with us. They've been really wishing for it, and as soon as they're invited to do it, most  students will embrace it pretty thoroughly.

We spent most of our time today talking a lot  about students and learning, related to ChatGPT, the ethics around that, but you've also discussed  several other ethical concerns related to the training and operation of generative AI, including  copyright, exploitation of precarious workers, environmental issues, etc. Can you talk a  little bit more about these concerns?

Yeah, it's important to recall that these models  are trained significantly on stolen merchandise, including things I'm willing to bet all of us  in this virtual podcast room have had our work sucked into these models and is being regurgitated  back to us without notice, without permission, without compensation. It is not impossible  to create a system where the origins of these models is compensated. It's not impossible. It's  incredibly unlikely to happen, though. So it's not

that I think we should sit around being sort of  “Ah, whatever that ship has sailed.” I think we actually should keep it in mind every time we use  it, that this stuff basically exists because of the use of material without permission and without  compensation. Now our judicial system is going to work through this in terms of our actual copyright  law, and I think it's probably going to turn out in favor of tech companies. But I think this is  primarily because our copyright law was written

at a time where the thought of this sort of  technology was not even in science fiction. So we can't confuse the strict outlines of copyright law  with justice and what is right. The environmental impacts of this technology is unknown. It could be  incredibly severe. We already know that it's using a lot of extra energy and a lot of extra water  in the data centers that are online in order to

train and deploy this technology. There's a lot of  arguments subsequent to me writing the book around like, well, it's not as much as like watching a  single series on Netflix or something like that. These comparisons I find interesting. But again,  anytime we're going to do this sort of stuff, we have to think, what is the cost to this benefit?  If ChatGPT really is just kind of a novelty, then

should we be using energy and draining aquifers  in order to power these servers? And the exploited labor, the labor in third world countries that is  used to train this is again, it's the story of our Westerners’ use of tech over and over again. It's  nothing new, but it's an intensified version of it, and it's something we should be mindful of. We  should be thinking about the ethical concerns of

all technology we use. Like I have an iPhone. It  has minerals that were mined under unconscionable conditions. I have Netflix that is using power  that is cooling a server that allows that sort of stuff to happen. I still do these things. I  also know that one of the biggest contributions to global warming is the beef industry. I still  eat. I have to be able to recognize these harms even while I do these things. I don't require  anyone to like put on the hairshirt and repent for

existing in modern society. We are where we are,  but I think we do have an obligation to understand the truth behind these potential harms around our  actions, just to be reasonable human beings in the world, like I'm about to go get on a plane to do  some various events, to talk at institutions and promote the book. None of that is necessary.  I could do everything over Zoom. I'm going to do it anyway, because I think it actually has a  little better impact than it does over Zoom. And

it's an enjoyable part of my life. Being able to  visit an institution and talk about these things, or work with faculty around how we adjust to  this technology is fulfilling. And so I have to be aware of the balance between the life I want to  live and the trade-offs and the costs to society. So it's really just a matter of being thoughtful  about in the same way we have to be thoughtful around student learning when we're deploying this  technology, we have to be thoughtful about these

impacts. Otherwise, I think, as the technology  develops, as greater demands are made around this technology, both funding, the money these  tech companies want to develop something like artificial general intelligence or to  deploy this technology in our institutions, often without our permission, without asking.  We should be aware of these things so that we can use them as frames for thinking about how  we want to use this technology in our lives, as

individuals and as educators, and as educational  institutions. We should never forget them. So we've talked a lot about the challenges and  the potential concerns associated with the use of generative AI, are there some uses that may  actually benefit students’ learning and maybe even benefit students’ writing, perhaps doing some  proofreading using AI tools, or perhaps evaluating a text that the students created to find some  weaknesses in their arguments. Might there be

some benefit for those types of activities? Anything is possible, and there's a lot of people doing some very interesting experimenting  around the intersection of learning using these tools and writing, and I encourage all  of that experimenting, even as I am not the person who is going to do it, because I don't  like to think of myself as a fundamentalist, but I do believe that this technology is primarily  useful to people with well developed professional

practices and to introduce it at times before  those things are there, I'm dubious. That said, I'm encouraging of class contexts that are  transparent and open… allow students to experiment with the technology as part of developing their  practices. I think that's all good, as long as it's done mindfully and with important end goals  around learning in mind. This is not my practice. I found this stuff increasingly less useful as  I worked on the book. I set out to use it as I

was working on it as a sort of demonstration to  myself and to see what would happen. Over time, it was less and less interesting, because I  realized that the predictive outputs of a large language model were not generative to me. I needed  that unique intelligence in order to help me do my work. I do have some what I think are hard and  fast lines around the use of this technology. If a student wants to sort of curiously and voluntarily  engage with this technology for their writing,

I think that's great. I would never personally  have a student write a piece for my course that was only going to be assessed and evaluated by a  large language model, and that's a betrayal of the relationship we should be establishing with our  students. I don't know why I would do it. If I'm teaching writing, the most important input I have  for my teaching is my students’ writing. So the idea that I'm going to let a large language model  grade that instead of me is sort of nonsensical.

But even to ask students to use it to get feedback  on their writing by my own urging, I don't know. I mean, this is a probability machine giving  feedback on writing. If I'm going to do that, I need to prove to myself that that output is  more useful to learning, not to the outcome, not to the grade, but to learning, than, say,  peer review or asking a student to read the work out loud to themselves, or do something that I  call a reverse outline, which is just a technique

for looking at something you've written, write a  question based outline for each paragraph. What audience question is being answered by this  paragraph, and does that reverse outline make sense? I've got a million things that students  could and should do with their writing that are not interacting with a large language model in  order to improve their writing. So personally, I would have to exhaust those before I would turn  to them. But I'm not against experimentation. I

know folks who are doing that. It's not for me, as  long as the experiment is predicated on learning, not just improving a student's output for the  purpose of a surface-level criteria grade, I'm for it, and I'm eager to see them, and people  share them with me, and sometimes I'm taken aback, and I'll have to eat some of my words and  think, “Okay, maybe I still wouldn't do this,

but I get why this person is doing it.” But again,  that's just a mindful teaching practice; that is using technology that's available to enhance the  experiences of their students around learning. That's the work. So I can't criticize or gainsay  that. When it is a substitute for what teachers

should be doing, when it allows for an end run  around our own labor, I think it's dangerous. And I would just say, since instructional faculty are  overwhelmingly your audience, I assume, we should be very, very, very, very, very, 12 more verys in  there, careful about outsourcing our instructional labor to automation, because it is a encouragement  for those who would like to automate faculty labor

to do so, and for those of us who have worked at  less than fully resourced institutions, we know what this sort of pressure is like. It's constant,  and the decisions that are made often have nothing

to do with the quality of learning or instruction.  And so if we're going to allow these things to, like write our syllabi or grade our assignments or  give peer student feedback or something like that, I would just say, be careful, because what you  may be demonstrating is, for the purposes of the institution, to collect tuition and convey  credits and credentials, you may be proving

you're not necessary. Now there's no way that  that process is the same as a good teacher, human interacting with other students, but  that's not a requirement for an institution to give grades and confer credentials, and so we  have to be aware of these things. I'm not saying we have to be Luddites ready to destroy the looms  owned by the factory, but we should understand the lessons of the Luddites and respect the actions  of the Luddites, which were not just to protect

their labor, but protect the quality of the  goods that were produced for the public. The mass-produced cloths were not as good as what  they did. The public ultimately decided mass production was more desirable than employing hand  weavers, but we're talking about education here, and when is mass produced education proved  superior to individual, bespoke relationships? Seems like a good note to  move to our last question,

which is we always end by asking, what's next? That's a good question. So whenever I write a book, I promise my wife to not write another  book for a year, because, as much as I love writing a book, and I love writing books,  because of what we've been talking about, like the depth of immersion that I have to do to  write a book is just steeply, deeply pleasurable, but it also makes me checked out of my life  in other ways. Now, fortunately, this book was

written quite quickly relative to my other books,  so that was good. But to answer your question, I've become increasingly interested in the idea of  apprenticeship and how we learn to do what we do. I'm gonna guess both you guys either had formal  apprenticeship programs to l earn to teach you had, like, literal mentors, or I, unfortunately  didn't have that. But what I did have was a lot of other people who are teaching around me who I  would go bug and say, “This isn't working. What do

you do? What can I do differently? Because  here's what's happening, and it is very, very unsatisfactory for everybody involved in the  equation, what else can we do?” And so I cobbled together a sort of apprenticeship model to help me  learn how to teach and reading. I read a bunch of books. I'll still never forget reading Ken Bain's  book What the Best College Teachers Do, where it

was literally like the scales falling from my  eyes. I'm like, “Oh my God, there's people who care about this stuff out there, and I can read  about it, and I'm going to start thinking about it too.” It was literally life changing. That book  was a form of apprenticeship to better learn how

to do the work of teaching. And the reality is,  huge swaths of our society and work are based on an apprenticeship model without us recognizing it.  And my concern over this technology is we're going to lose it, either because we decide to outsource  the work of the apprentice to the technology in the interests of increased efficiency and lowered  cost, or when we ask apprentice workers to do the work, we will not be requiring them to have  the kinds of experiences that allow them to

become the mentor. If an associate lawyer is  writing a brief using large language models, they will be missing out on the kinds of thinking  that will make them the mentor lawyer one day. My older brother's a lawyer, and he's concerned about  this stuff, like “How do I make me?” And what makes him is all the thinking he's done over the  course of his career to do this. So I'm fascinated by that. So I'm thinking of some kind of project  around that, maybe not a book, maybe a podcast,

so I can tell my wife I'm not writing a book, I'm  doing a podcast. But that's what's interesting me right now. That's sort of, how do we learn  to be what we are, and what does that entail, and how does this technology threaten those  things, and what will happen if we allow it to

dissolve those relationships in our workplace? Well, this conversation and your book has provoked an awful lot of thought, and I've really enjoyed  both listening to you and reading your book, and I'd strongly encourage anyone who  is thinking about using generative AI tools to read through your book. Oh, it's my pleasure. I have been a long time listener, and so getting on Tea for Teaching is  a career honor that I'll always be glad for. Thank you so much. Thank you.

If you've enjoyed this podcast, please  subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service.  To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page. You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com.  Music by Michael Gary Brewer.