Artificial students, mindless citizens

The Age of AI is well upon us. It is offered to summarize our PDFs. Google searches now are headed by an “AI Overview.” Forms of artificial intelligence already are in use in healthcare and finance as well as many other industries. AI now generates entertainment content, including images and videos.

I teach political science both with undergraduate and graduate students. In education, AI, especially in the form of chatbots like ChatGPT, has flooded into campuses. Students use these tools to brainstorm, research, outline, compose, and edit assignments. Many go so far as to have ChatGPT and like systems write their papers for them with minimal to no original contribution by the student.

While some teachers have embraced widespread student use, I remain firmly opposed. I require that students not use AI at any point in the brainstorming, writing, and editing of essays. I do so with the penalty of failing the assignment if such usage is caught.

Certainly, times and manners exist where AI usage is appropriate. However, in the classroom, it does extensive damage and poses an alarming threat to us as human beings and as citizens.

AI usage for brainstorming, writing, and editing especially showcase these damaging threats. I assign papers for two broad reasons. I seek to assess the students’ capacity to think and to communicate about the assigned topics. When AI largely writes the paper, I am not assessing that student. I am assessing the chatbot. AI did the work, not the student. Yet the student receives the grade, not ChatGPT. It is an imposter submission that receives an imposter score. It is, then, a lie and an injustice.

But that is far from the worst effect. The point of written essays and like assignments is not merely assessment. It is development. In the exercise of composing and editing an essay, students do not merely show how well they can think and communicate. Done properly, they cultivate and hone those skills. They learn not just about the topic but about how to exercise their reason in a deeper fashion and their speech in a clearer manner. A ChatGPT paper deprives them of that exercise and thus of that development. We decry outsourcing our industries overseas because of the negative effects doing so has on the lives of our citizens. How much worse the outsourcing of our minds and tongues. The former outsourcing undermines our economic independence. The latter undermines the independence of our very being.

This last issue points to a more particular problem. As a teacher of American politics, I see how widespread student use of AI poses a grave threat to our polity. Our government is supposed to be a republic—a form of popular rule wherein the ultimate human authority is the people. Our republican form flows from the foundational insight of the Declaration of Independence: that “all men are created equal.” That equality calls for a system where equal persons consent to the structure and the officeholders through whom political rule is exercised. They participate in that rule through listening, persuading, and voting. In other words, the American regime is grounded upon self-government; and that self-government is an essential component of our liberty.

AI in the classroom strikes at the heart of our republican form. Self-government requires the ability to think for oneself, to sift through information and arguments in a thoughtful manner. It moreover demands the capacity to express that thinking persuasively so that the people then can express their will in the form of elections and then in laws.

However, if ChatGPT is thinking for you, then you are not self-governing. Someone, really something, else is making judgments about what is right and wrong, advantageous and disadvantageous. Someone else is composing the words by which elections and thus governance is determined. You merely follow what others have thought and said in your place.

We should not sugar-coat the clear implication: If you are not self-governing, then you are not free. You are subject through your ignorance to the “thinking” AI has done in your stead. As you think less, your ability to step in and do so, to retake the reins of self-governance, diminishes. You think less deeply and communicate with decreasing clarity.

AI seems to be with us no matter what we do. Yet we must be conscious and careful in the uses to which we put it. We must beat back all deployments that undermine our humanity and our capacity for self-government. To do otherwise is to neglect our God-given abilities and undermine our God-endowed purpose. That outcome is not to be passively accepted or ignorantly embraced. Our job is to fight against it.