Slice Of Life/OpenWrite: Bewildered By AI

Since December, when ChatGPT arrived, I’ve been paying close attention to how the advancements of Artificial Intelligence have been playing out. I wrote a column about its impact on education in our local newspaper and I’ve played with many of the tools arriving seemingly daily that integrate AI into the act of writing.

I’m still bewildered by it all. I can certainly see the possibilities but also worry about the unforeseen elements of these AI systems pushed out into the public, with few guardrails or weak parameters. We just don’t know how people will use the AI tools, and that’s a concern, I think.

I don’t necessarily arrive at the AI evolution from a negative standpoint, thinking it will be the end of the world as we know it. I am open to the wonder of technology. I remain very curious. I do believe AI will change teaching and learning in many ways, although how and when is still undetermined. I just hope that change isn’t reduced to writing essays in little blue notebooks again. I hope we educators look at our teaching practice, critically, and revamp to make inquiry and creativity at the heart of what we want our students to do.

This morning, over at the OpenWrite at Ethical ELA, the prompt for poetry was to consider using an AI site for playing with poetry, but I found I didn’t want to do that today. Instead, I found myself writing a poem about being bewildered by AI, particularly about how our own words — put out here in blogs and other online spaces — are probably what is feeding the AI databases, and when we write a prompt for the AI to write to, it’s probably regurgitating back with our own words, just jumbled and jangled up, and tied with a technological bow.

Isn’t that strange to think about?

Here’s my morning poem:

Let me sit a moment
in this silence,
reduced to the hum
of a machine, at rest

It’s bewildering, at best,
this database, the way
predictive text paints
a poem with someone else’s
words

or maybe inked of our own,
you never know –
some scraps of writing
past might now be
nestled inside the box,
boomeranged back
with a prompt

But I won’t even
recognize myself,
reduced to numbers
and noise;

What’s long gone
gets gobbled up,
and the future,
still a pencil mark away

Write At Rest

Peace (and Purpose),
Kevin

6 Comments
  1. My slice was also inspired by the Ethical ELA prompt today. I like that you chose to go rogue and share your reflections in this poem. This line “But I won’t even recognize myself” packed a lot of impact for me.

  2. Thanks for your slice. All this new trend is worrying. I agree teachers have to alter our practices and learn about these in order to be aware of what may be delivered to us.

  3. There’s so much to think about. I was just talking to my son about how has been experimenting with AI as part of his art–and he was describing how much it has improved over the last year. I’m interested in how writers and artists and other use AI in ways that expand, integrating the human experience rather than replacing it.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *