I’m thinking about AI today. Last week I read Erik Hoel’s article Here lies the internet, murdered by generative AI which takes a dismal view of how AI has impacted culture—from fake Sports Illustrated writers to AI-generated children’s videos on YouTube.
What was striking was the dissonance between that dismal view and the hopeful view expressed by all the resources that I’m curating on my ai in teaching and learning page. The thought that lingers for me is: are these teaching and learning tools connecting with the whole human in the student? I’d love to see the above tools in action to get a sense for how they work and how students feel when using them. I think a key difference between the people using AI in Erik’s article and these researchers is that those in Erik’s article are largely motivated by profit. The researchers are more likely motivated by a belief that their work is meaningful and truly helping AND might be more reflective in evaluating whether their tools are actually helping than YT content creators. For YT, the incentive for more views is just so strong.