Aweh, My Dearly Beloved Fellow Ruminants & Groupies,
In the hollow halls of academia, a battle rages: Should students use AI? One camp cling to their quills and parchment, screaming “heresy!” The other—people like me—shrug and say, The genie’s out, deal with it. AI isn’t some passing trend; it’s a paradigm shift, and the only rational response is to learn how to use it well.
Students should simply disclose their AI use. No drama, no scandal. Here’s a tidy last sentence for their declarations:
“The author rigorously reviewed, edited, and validated all AI-generated suggestions. Final decisions on ideation, analysis, conclusions, and content integrity remain solely the responsibility of the author.”
Neat. Honest. Done.
This week, I grabbed coffee with an old friend I hadn’t seen in ages. For reasons neither of us fully understand, we ended up in an intense AI-in-education debate. He wasn’t buying my argument.
So now, I’m prepping for round two. Here’s what I wrote (quickly) as my opening salvo.
Just some food for thought for a further discussion. How do we learn and how do we develop our worldview? When I was young, I was forced to read the Bible and by the age of 12 was starting to struggle with accepting it. To make this simple lets only consider the first sentence of Genesis, “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” God? Is there a God? If so, did he/she create the earth? What does heaven mean? (The Universe?). Is there a beginning? Etc etc. And so started my journey to atheism.
In my first year of university, a friend gave me Milton Friedman’s, “Free to Choose”. I found it very compelling. I guess it is a free markets and capitalist manifesto. I still find it compelling but perhaps now I’m a bit more conscious of market failure and the risks of extreme capitalism. As a young academic I had to spend many (tedious) hours in libraries finding papers and photocopying them. Let’s leave aside the technical literature. I gravitated to capitalist literature. I found Marxist literature tedious, pretentious and most of all wrong. I was forced to learn from printed documents.
Fast forward to now and AI. Now you can find literature, scholarly, and grey instantly using AI. Vastly superior and more productive. Libraries full of paper are becoming increasingly irrelevant, although some will wail about their inevitable decline, but it will happen no matter how much they wail.
A paper library is a tool. ChatGPT 4 is a vastly better tool! I have encountered (deluded) students who suggest that modern earth moving equipment should be banned in South Africa so we can create thousands of manual labour jobs for people with pickaxes and shovels. Paper libraries are the shovels of learning and Chat GPT4 is the bulldozer of learning. Improving your writing by using a paper copy of Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style or using ChatGPT 4 faces an equally stark difference. My prediction is that Dreyer’s book will soon become a quaint historical relic. This is inevitable.
Discussion for our next coffee.
Here’s a different version with a bit of help from ChatGPT and me giving ChatGPT a lot of guidance about how I would like it to be written and the style of writing I would like. I asked for a Ruminant Pink Friday writing style. ChatGPT read my previous blog posts and tried to adopt its style. The output still required quite a bit of further editing by me till I was happy with it. I didn’t spend a lot of time on this, but with more time I could improve it a lot more!
From Bible Verses to AI Bulldozers: A Journey in Learning (and Unlearning)
Food for thought before our next caffeine-fuelled debate: How do we learn? How do we shape our worldview?
When I was a kid, I was force-fed the Bible. By 12, I was already choking on it. Let’s keep it simple—Genesis 1:1: “In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth.” Oh really? God? Which one? Did they actually create the earth? What’s “heaven” even mean? (A poetic way to say the universe?) Is there a beginning? And so began my not-so-spiritual pilgrimage to atheism.
Fast-forward to university: a friend handed me Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose, aka the capitalist’s battle cry. I inhaled it. Still do, though now with a slightly more jaundiced eye recognising market failures and capitalism’s more apocalyptic tendencies creating repeated crises. Meanwhile, I spent soul-crushing hours in the library, hunting down papers, photocopying like a medieval scribe. Let’s leave aside technical literature and consider politics. Marxist lit? A mix of self-important drivel and economic delusion. But hey, I had no choice—dead trees were my only learning option.
And then: AI. No more musty stacks. No more paper-choked archives. Now, AI delivers scholarly works and obscure grey literature in seconds. Libraries? A relic. Sure, some will wail about their decline, but reality doesn’t care.
A library is a tool. ChatGPT-4 is a better tool. Some (deeply confused) students claim South Africa should ban earth-moving equipment to create jobs for guys with shovels. By that logic, libraries are the shovels of learning, and ChatGPT-4? The bulldozer. Dreyer’s English is a lovely book, but compared to AI, it’s a museum piece. This shift isn’t just coming—it’s already here.
Oh, and for the record—I used ChatGPT-4 for clarity and grammar. But no, it didn’t write this. That was me.
Next coffee discussion: bring your best counterarguments. Get with the program!
Dearly beloved readers, which version is better? Did ChatGPT write the 2nd version? Is it rotting my brain? Is it a useful tool? Should we try to ban students from using AI? Is this even possible? I am sure you have more wisdom than I do on this topic.
Thanks for all the comments and input.
Bruce
Ruminant Pink Friday 