Head of School's Message: January 9

We looked at Jason Allen’s A.I. generated Theatre d’Opera Spatial which received the top prize for the Colorado State Fair’s art competition last summer. The New York Times reported a fierce debate has ensued about the ethics of A.I. art. Jason Allen has said, “Art is dead. It’s over. A.I. won. Humans lost.” Others believe that something requiring a few keyboard clicks cannot rise to the level of art. A.I.-produced art amounts to high-tech plagiarism. To preserve the integrity of both creative processes, Chandler students settled on categorizing A.I.-generated art separately from traditionally generated art.

A.I.’s disruptive impact on education goes beyond art. In The College Essay is Dead in the December Atlantic, journalist Stephen Marche writes about GPT-3, an open-source A.I. language model that automatically generates text from a prompt. College students who have used GPT-3 to write essays don’t feel like they’re cheating because honor codes state you are not allowed to get someone else to do your work for you. They defend themselves with the argument that GPT-3 isn’t ‘someone else’, it’s a program. Stephen Marche quoted a professor from the University of Toronto, “The essay has been at the center of education for generations. It’s the way we teach children how to research, think and write. That entire tradition is about to be disrupted from the ground up.” 

I asked my college senior son what to do about it. Until programs are developed that detect when A.I. has generated work, he thinks that supervised writing assignments and handwritten essays will assure teachers that work has been entirely generated by a student rather than by a machine.

Does that mean a return to more handwriting instruction? In Cursive is History: My students can’t read script. How will they interpret the past? in the October Atlantic, Drew Gilpin Faust former president of Harvard University, who still teaches history there, observes, “Writing is a technology and most technologies are surpassed and replaced.” At the same time, she is concerned that many of her students choose projects that avoid researching primary documents because they cannot read cursive and they have not been taught how to write it. They ask her to read the cursive comments she writes on their papers because they cannot decipher them.

Chandler students receive one year of formal cursive instruction in third grade later reinforced in fourth grade. Defenders of cursive say it is a key connection between hand and brain, an essential form of self-discipline, and a fundamental expression of identity. As we look at ways to cope with disruptive A.I. technology and help students discover their authentic voices, it’s possible that old tech like handwriting may gain more prominence. Humans win!