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BY JONATHAN REES

This post is about the biggest threat to the jobs of college professors in America today. No, not that guy. Not the guy with the chain saw either. I’m writing about that other subject that you’re sick of reading about because it just makes you depressed.

I first wrote about AI for this blog last September rather reluctantly because I wasn’t really sure I had anything to add to the discussion. I got over that hesitation because nobody had really described to me exactly what AI was and why everyone had started talking about it at that moment until my old friend Jonathan Poritz visited campus and did both those things. Long story short: It’s not that big a leap between the technology we had before all the hype started and what we have now. Also, the writing it produces is really bad.

That proved to be a pretty good resting place for my mind on this topic. Whenever someone has asked me about AI since (which admittedly doesn’t happen a lot but has actually happened), I explained that it’s not that big a leap between the technology we had before all the hype started and that the writing it produces is really bad. When I somehow managed to run an entire fifty-minute discussion on this subject in my Introduction to History for Majors class this last spring, I deliberately saved the ethics of the subject for the last five minutes because I thought attacking AI in practical terms first would be much more effective.

Sadly, this argument hasn’t been quite as effective as I had originally hoped. When I do make this argument, some people say stuff to me along the lines of, “Since we know that AI is the future, we as professors have to teach our students to use it responsibility.” This then leads me to wonder if my only job in the near future is going to be to teach undergraduates how to come up with better prompts and whether anyone will be willing to pay me for doing that.

Luckily for me, since I still read all the depressing articles about AI that I see, I came across the perfect counter to that position this morning. The author here is Nicholas Carr, the author of The Shallows, among other great books about technology:

Automation is most pernicious . . . when a machine takes command of a job before the person using the machine has gained any direct experience doing the work. Without experience, without practice, talent is stillborn. That was the story of the “deskilling” phenomenon of the early Industrial Revolution. Skilled craftsmen were replaced by unskilled machine operators. The work sped up, but the only skill the machine operators developed was the skill of operating the machine, which in most cases was hardly any skill at all. Take away the machine, and the work stops . . . .

Generative AI enables students to produce the product without doing the work. Rather than reading and making sense of difficult source texts, they can ask a chatbot to gin up simplified summaries. Rather than synthesizing various ideas and perspectives through concerted thinking, they can ask the chatbot for a generic synthesis. And rather than expressing (and refining) their thoughts through the composition of sentences and paragraphs, they can get the bot to spit out a first draft or even a final one. The paper a student hands in no longer provides evidence of the work of learning its creation entailed. It is a substitute for the work.

That’s why I’m unrelentingly hostile to AI, and you should be too. It’s not about saving your job per se, it’s about justifying why your job is important in the first place.

Contributing editor Jonathan Rees is professor of history at Colorado State University–Pueblo.