The Unexpected Benefits of AI

Now that the Holy Father has expressed his thoughts on AI, allow me to express my opinion on AI’s effect in education. I believe that, in a sort of “eucastrophic” way, AI could be good for traditional methods. How so? 

By allowing a student to present work as “his” work when in fact it is not, AI renders any work not actually seen as done by the student as highly suspect. This includes essays, papers, book reports, even art projects. It is like giving him a test on the multiplication tables to do at home with a calculator. So, what is to be done? The solution may be—perhaps can only be—to see the student actually do the work. That is, give him paper and a pen and watch him write his answer.  

Think of what this entails. First, to produce an on-site written product, the student will have to write legibly, which means penmanship. Penmanship was neglected once word processors became ubiquitous, and so now we have students (and adults) who cannot write legibly and who have also lost the other benefits associated with penmanship, such as spelling, reading, and greater recollection of material. Penmanship was the key to success in any non-oral communication, and this only made sense since it didn’t matter what the student knew if he couldn’t write it neatly enough for someone else to read. The surest way to “AI proof” a written assignment is to have the student actually write it; and he had better write so someone else can read it.  

Next, a student writing anything will have to know how to spell. A brain does not come with spellcheck installed. It cannot correct “their” when “they’re” was meant or “accept” when “except” was intended unless the person knows the difference. The English language is a stew of thousands of years of the influence of other languages, and for each spelling rule that can (and should) be learned, there are exceptions. Only the actual knowledge of these words, their use, and often their etymology, can ensure (not “insure”) one’s spelling of them correctly. 

The next step is the crafting of an intelligible sentence. Just as a brain does not have spellcheck, nor does it have Grammarly. The student must know how to construct basic sentences with subject-verb agreement, proper punctuation and capitalization, proper verb tense and mood, prepositional phrases put where they ought to be and without dangling participles or misused pronouns. If the above technologies have been a crutch to those without such knowledge, AI is a wheelchair. No more. Any student hoping to have his answer or essay make sense will have to know real grammar. Diagramming anyone? 

And, of course, there is vocabulary. To a great extent, we think in words; so the breadth of our thought is limited or expands with our vocabulary. A student staring at a piece of paper must have his thesaurus in his head. This comes from extensive reading and knowledge of classical languages. If he hopes at all to raise his writing above the baseline of “This book was cool,” he must have words to do so. 

Good writing is not only good on the page but also in the ear. As Romano Guardini said, “The language a man speaks is the world in which he lives and strives; it belongs to him more essentially than the land and things he calls his own.” So, if you want good English prose, you must have students reading out loud good English writing—and not only reading it out loud but memorizing and reciting it. A good writer hears and feels his words as much as he writes them. To this end, we must go back to the memorization and recitation of poems and drama. Only by having certain words, sounds, and cadences in his head can a student hope to produce them on paper. 

Finally, there is the skill and art of composing one’s thoughts. This only comes from practice. It comes from getting back a paper so bleeding in red ink that it looks as though it had been in a knife fight, with the last comment being, “Write it again.” It comes from thinking, and thinking hard, “What am I trying to say? Does ‘b’ follow from ‘a’? Does this make sense?” 

Any teacher that assumes an “at home” or “over the summer” assignment was actually done by the student is fooling himself. Any college that assumes a student’s application essay was actually written by the student himself is engaging in wishful thinking. The same holds true for letters of recommendation. With AI, all these can be produced and “highly personal” in a matter of seconds and are as valuable as those “personal” letters you get from political candidates. With technology, we thought we could do away with “old fashioned” disciplines, but we may soon find we can’t do without them. 

It may be that some schools will pass on this and not grade on legibility, spelling, and punctuation, much less coherent thought. Some scrawl that looks as though it has been written by a frenzied doctor in a rush will have to receive the same grade as a neatly written, grammatically correct, and well thought out essay. If that’s your view of education, then you can have it. Every car will have a bumper sticker that reads “My child is an honor student!” Sooner or later, though, someone values integrity; either the school itself or those viewing graduates of the school. There will be a growing (increasing) gulf between schools, and that gulf will be traditional disciplines. 

Many schools, especially public schools, won’t face the challenge. Their budgets have become swollen by technology and the training for it and there is little chance they would allow those budgets to be cut. They also are beholden to the philosophy that computers and screens are the keys to producing geniuses. Only schools whose students have been drilled in traditional methods will produce graduates with genuine, not artificial, intelligence.  

The odd thing is, we’ve known this, or should have known this, all along. We are more than brains on sticks. We are beings with a body. And education involves all one’s senses—which implies a real human body doing the work and a real human body grading it. So, if parents want to send their child to a school that embraces AI, then let them do it—and watch in horror as the class valedictorian stumbles through his AI-generated speech at graduation because he doesn’t actually know many of the words.  

This may take a generation or two. Then again, the way technology has accelerated things, it may take only five or 10 years. AI will force schools and parents to choose between an artificial education and a real one. I, for one, look forward to the battle.