Please, keep AI out of the classroom

One college sells out — and everyone is going to be worse off

Per the Chronicle, Morehouse College has decided that professors need AI assistants:

This fall, a small group of professors at Morehouse College will use these TAs, which are actually digital avatars resembling each professor’s physical appearance and demeanor. The chemistry instructor The Chronicle tried out for this story is based on Muhsinah Morris, a Morehouse chemistry professor who is spearheading the project. Proponents hope students will turn to these virtual TAs to answer questions and even deliver some lectures.

For a number of reasons, I think this is a very bad idea.

All of us are going to have to make a choice about how we use generative AI tools like ChatGPT. Personally, I have chosen near-total abstention. When I do use ChatGPT, it is for fairly dull tasks, like:

• In a piece I was writing, I had a list of thinkers I wanted to mention. I wanted to verify that they were in chronological order, so I asked ChatGPT to order them by birthday. What would have taken five minutes ended up being near-instantaneous, and it let me work on other things.

• Since ChatGPT can browse the internet, it is a better search engine than Google when you’re asking a complex question. So if I am looking for, say, representative examples of Soviet Realism which have not be widely discussed in the English-speaking world, ChatGPT can help get me started.

I think these two tasks have something in common: they would be time-consuming, there isn’t much benefit in me doing it myself, and they allow me to focus on tasks which really matter.

I can imagine someone else being significantly more liberal on this matter and using ChatGPT for all sorts of things. I can also imagine someone being significantly more conservative and simply banishing generative AI from the realm. (I respect the latter more than former.) But I think I’ve drawn a line at a reasonable place, and I can justify where I’ve drawn that line, so for now I feel alright about the decision.

But the use of AI at Morehouse? I do not feel alright about this at all.