The importance of teaching students what AI can’t do

It’s disconcerting to envision human thought becoming redundant or deemed inferior due to advancements in artificial intelligence. But for all its ills, AI cannot be ignored or wished away. It’s here to stay, and I want my students to understand the stakes of becoming too reliant on this technology. I can’t blame them for wondering why they should dedicate so much time and effort to honing their writing and critical thinking skills if large language models appear to do a passable job. Yet this situation has major implications for culture and societies. It’s easy to envision a future where AI dependency leads to intellectual conformity and the erosion of critical thinking. Researchers are already documenting these effects, which threaten to render the hard work of wrestling with ideas a lost art. This is why I think it’s critical for educators to confront AI head-on. The key, I believe, is teaching students to distinguish AI’s pattern recognition skills from its inability to daydream, inhabit human perspectives and authentically express itself. Tell me what you think In a course I recently taught on Southern Gothic literature, I gave my students an exercise. They were tasked with prompting AI to analyze the “emotional atmosphere” of a scene from Carson McCullers’ 1940 novel “The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.” Many of the characters readers meet in Southern Gothic works like McCullers’ are freakish and brutal. Rendered from a distorted, unnatural lens, they speak in odd dialects and conjure what Flannery O’Connor called the “grotesque.” They live in isolated places that are stuck in the past and, to use another term of O'Connor’s, are “Christ-haunted.” Many readers have difficulty synthesizing the strange worlds of these characters. AI has an even harder time generalizing the complex tensions between faith and unbelief, or good and evil, that animate these stories. Carson McCullers. AP Photo To limit the range of responses and allow useful comparisons, I provided students with scenes involving the main characters of the novel. One of them was the heartrending sequence in which Spiros Antonapoulos, a deaf character, is sent away to a state insane asylum, leaving his only friend, John Singer, behind. The scene carries a palpable sense of dread and sadness. Further, it invokes righteous anger toward Antonapoulos’ cousin for sending him away – a decision driven by convenience and based on a misunderstanding of Spiros’ struggles as deviant, antisocial behavior. That he is from an immigrant background living in small-town Georgia gives the scene an even sharper edge. ChatGPT, however, rendered the scene using sterile, abstract terminology. To pull a representative response that one of my students shared: “The atmosphere is devastatingly lonely and suspended in time. The scene feels quiet, helpless and emotionally one-sided. There is no dramatic farewell; instead, the moment is marked by Singer’s silent anguish. The train’s departure symbolizes irreversible separation.” The assessment is clinical and cold. It fails to capture the weight of deep sadness that exudes from the separation of two friends who have only each other. It included a factual mistake, too: It’s a bus, not a train, that pulls away. Also missing is any clear acknowledgment of Singer’s fear for the horrors in store for Antonapoulos, and the dramatic irony created by Antonapoulos’ own seeming obliviousness to how his life is being upended. AI simply lacks the lived experience to become contextually aware in ways that allow it to truly understand McCullers’ haunting novel. Because AI largely functions as an optimization engine – relying on synthesizing vast amounts of online data and summarizing the results – its analyses of this scene and others were consistently shallow; they “lacked depth” and were filled with “vague platitudes,” as two students put it. Accessing the embodied experience Next, I asked my students to have AI generate “a new scene involving at least three characters” of their choosing. The creative output was even more soulless. Students were especially amused that AI had John Singer, who acts as a hub connecting all the other characters, speaking on a variety of subjects. The problem, of course, is that Singer, like Antonapoulos, is also deaf. Alan Arkin plays John Singer in the 1968 film adaptation of ‘The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.’ Warner Bros. That AI could not fathom the experience of being unable to hear isn’t surprising. It’s important to remember that engaging with AI means dealing with a synthetic intelligence that lacks a body through which to experience and interact with the world. Without an embodied presence it cannot put itself in the shoes of its users and experience anything approaching human empathy. While tech billionaires such as Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen may see empathy and introspection as weaknesses, those traits are the beating heart of literature and art, the wellspring of creativity and human connection. In other words, emotion, empathy and irrationality could be seen as some of the most powerful counterweights to AI. Embracing human frailty There may be situations where AI may be useful to my students, and I think efforts to ban the use of AI are unfeasible and counterproductive. The ability to forgo these tools altogether is largely a luxury. Just as many people can’t afford to have someone else clean their homes, landscape their yards or nanny their kids, those struggling to make ends meet may need to lean on AI assistance. But my hope is that my students – especially when it comes to their intellectual work – will understand that deploying the technology requires abandoning capacities that are essential to human thought and creativity: imagination, intuition and self-reflection. I want them to think twice before trying to mask, with a chatbot, the inherent frailties, weaknesses, obsessions and digressions of the human mind. Instead, I want them to embrace these human tendencies and surrender to what poet William Wordsworth called the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” After all, the greatest art often emerges from those who are at their most vulnerable, confused and lost.