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
Peace (and Purpose),
Kevin
