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The Opinions
A.I. Is Fueling a ‘Poverty of Imagination.’ Here’s How We Can Fix It.
00:30:04
What bots are really doing in the classroom.
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- [00:01]
Meher Ahmad
Hi, I'm Juliette from New York Times.
- [00:02]
Jessica Gross
Games, and I'm here talking to fans about our games.
- [00:05]
Meher Ahmad
You play New York Times Games?
- [00:06]
Jessica Gross
Yes, every day. There's this little tab down here called.
- [00:09]
Meher Ahmad
Friends, so you can add your friend.
- [00:11]
Tressie McMillan Cottom
That feels new to me. It is.
- [00:13]
Meher Ahmad
It's nice to have the social aspect.
- [00:15]
Tressie McMillan Cottom
Oh, my God.
- [00:15]
Jessica Gross
And you have all the Times. That's crazy, right?
- [00:17]
Meher Ahmad
You can look at Spelling Bee, wordle Connections.
- [00:21]
Tressie McMillan Cottom
Oh, my God.
- [00:21]
Jessica Gross
Amazing. Love that I have to get the app.
- [00:23]
Meher Ahmad
New York Times Games subscribers get full access to all our games and features. Subscribe now@nytimes.com games for a special offer.
- [00:34]
Unknown Host
This is the Opinions, a show that brings you a mix of voices from New York Times Opinion. You've heard the news. Here's what to make of it.
- [00:49]
Meher Ahmad
I'm Meher Ahmad, and I'm an editor for the New York Times Opinion section. Today, I'm joined by my colleagues, writer Jessica Gross and columnist Tressie McMillan Cottam, to talk about artificial intelligence and higher education. Hi to both of you.
- [01:03]
Tressie McMillan Cottom
Hi.
- [01:04]
Jessica Gross
Thanks so much for having me. Hello.
- [01:05]
Tressie McMillan Cottom
Always a pleasure to be here. And hi, Jessica. Good to see you.
- [01:10]
Meher Ahmad
So both of you have given this a lot of thought. Tressy, you're in the classroom often as a sociology professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and have called Generative AI Mid Tech, which we'll get into. And, Jess, you've spent time interviewing parents, students, and most recently, educators across the humanities to write a series of pieces on AI and education for your newsletter. And it's the last few weeks of summer. Schools are gearing to start back up soon, so I've gathered us together because there's been much said about how critical thinking skills are atrophying under the consistent use of AI like ChatGPT or Gemini. So I want to talk with both of you about how we grapple with AI's role in higher education.
- [01:49]
Tressie McMillan Cottom
If you're a broke college student and.
- [01:50]
Jessica Gross
You need some extra money, let me show you how I make an extra.
- [01:53]
Tressie McMillan Cottom
Five to six hundred dollars a week by using ChatGPT.
- [01:57]
Jessica Gross
I've got my theater history notes.
- [01:58]
Meher Ahmad
I have highlighted chapter one. Look at that. It already created flashcards. Sometimes I even tell it, like, sound like I'm 20.
- [02:06]
Tressie McMillan Cottom
And I give it, like, all of my demographics. If it's like, over, like, 50 words.
- [02:09]
Meher Ahmad
Like, yeah, I don't want to write that shit. So before we dive into our conversation today, I wanted to kind of just get a temperature check from both of you on how you feel about AI being used by Students in higher education. On a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being burn it down and 10 being extremely beneficial, how do you rank the use of AI in the classroom?
- [02:31]
Tressie McMillan Cottom
I should preface this by saying I do not pretend to be a universal sample on this. Having said that, I'm going to put it at a two.
- [02:41]
Jessica Gross
I was just thinking two to be generous.
- [02:43]
Tressie McMillan Cottom
Yep.
- [02:44]
Jessica Gross
Most days I want to send my children to a monastery.
- [02:47]
Tressie McMillan Cottom
Yes, that's about right. That's about it.
- [02:50]
Jessica Gross
So, you know, we're both. You might not hear a pro, a super pro AI point of view on this discussion, but I will try to present the other side as best I can and present some of the more positive use cases that I have heard through my reporting, because there are some.
- [03:08]
Meher Ahmad
So, okay, so the temperature is not, not good. We're, we're tepid at best. Well, trustee, I wanted to start with you. You've been critical of AI's role in education. You know, as I said, you called it mid tech, where it's being used for mundane tasks. And you know what? We actually need to be promoting in education expertise instead. So I was curious if you could explain that idea, like how does it factor into higher education for you?
- [03:33]
Tressie McMillan Cottom
Yeah. So artificial intelligence is an iteration of a wave of educational technology in education systems. And so I think it's important to think of it in that context because a lot of the sort of cultural power and the political power that AI has right now, which I would argue is outsized given how useful AI is or is not to actual educators and students. There's a lot of hype. Right, right. And a lot of that hype is based on the premise that there's something really novel about it. Right. And that if we don't jump on this new novel, innovative general purpose technology that's gonna transform society, education will be left behind. So because of that, I think it is super important to have some historical context. And I've been writing and studying and researching educational technology in higher education for a long time, and people will just have to trust me on this. AI is not that novel. It is not that potentially revolutionary. It is in long continuum of technologies that promise to transform education, starting with the TV, the typewriter, VCRs, tablets. If anybody remembers when we were going to give everybody a Chromebook. Right. AI is in that continuum. Most of the promotion of AI in schools boils down to, well, it's happening. And so students need to know, but there's nothing attaching it to learning outcomes. There's nothing assessing its risk to Privacy to data, to the mental and emotional and cognitive development of students. And that's actually what education is supposed to do. So because of that, my premise here about AI, not just in education, by the way, but when I say that AI is mid one, it's an illusion if I do say so myself. Tried to be crafty there, but there's an allusion to the fact that AI quite literally is an averaging of the mid level range of responses to a prompt. That's how it arrives at the things that it tells you. But also the idea that I don't think that it is nearly as transformative, especially to the social processes of things like education and learning as it is predicted to be. There are very few strong, universal, universally positive use cases for AI in education right now.
- [05:38]
Meher Ahmad
And Jess, how does Tressy's take on AI factor into what you're hearing from the many pieces that you've written about how it's being used in classrooms and by teachers and students?
- [05:48]
Jessica Gross
Yeah, I mean it absolutely tracks. I think there's some nuance, just only in the way that it's being used for different age groups. So I think it has zero place in K through 6 or 7. The fact that it is even in the differential of discussion for children that age is absurd to me because there's ample evidence that they do not learn how to read properly, just even with screens read and comprehend properly. It's a different process. They really need paper, pen, the old fashioned implements. So let's put that aside for now. Getting to the college level. I think there should be some training in different subject matter areas about how to use the technology if it is appropriate and if it is going to actually improve the research that is happening. So humanities, I really think there are very few cases of where its use is going to be helpful to the way that the students are thinking. But I could see in medical research you're seeing that the AI pattern recognition is really helping come up with novel fixes and novel medications to problems that have bedeviled researchers for a long time. But I think I fully agree with trustee about the humanities and that there are very limited use cases where it leads to deeper thinking, better research. I'm just not convinced by what I've seen and the same I've tried to use it and basically what I'm told is oh, you know, it'll help with your research, it will help summarize things. I don't know what's important to a piece of text for what I'm writing until I've Read the entire piece of text. Like, why does what AI think is important going to be what I think is important to the argument that I'm trying to build, which again, writing and thinking is such a bespoke cognitive process that AI can't tell me what I think about something that I haven't read yet. I mean it just saying it out loud sounds absurd, but it feels like we need to explain that at this point because it's being pushed as this cure all, think all human tool. I'm just not convinced of that.
- [08:05]
Meher Ahmad
Just speaking of humanities, you wrote a piece in your newsletter about how humanities professors are dealing with students that are using AI in their classrooms. And it sounded like they're kind of coming into this with an understanding that the fact that it's being used by their students is a given. What did you learn when you spoke to these professors?
- [08:24]
Jessica Gross
So it was unexpectedly inspiring to hear about how so many humanities professors are remaking their classes to rely more on in person activities and exams that create community within the classroom, but also involve the community outside the classroom. So one example is a professor at Beloit College, which is a small private liberal arts college in Wisconsin, told me about teaching the novel the Dispossessed, which is an Ursula Le Guin novel. And as part of the class, the students had to run discussions on the novel at libraries, public schools, senior centers. And she told me a crucial part of the class involves students practicing and role playing before our outreach events. And then later they'd reflect upon what they learned from their experiences, what they do differently, and how they describe their new skill sets to potential employers. And she didn't outright ban the use of of AI in her class, which I thought was also really interesting. She had the students discuss among themselves what they thought would be appropriate and come up with a code of conduct that they all agreed to stick to. Because one thing that I heard from a lot of professors is they don't want to be cops. They don't want to spend their time policing adults use of this technology. So there needs to be sort of this transparent discussion around appropriate and inappropriate uses because just banning it outright doesn't work anymore.
- [09:51]
Meher Ahmad
And Tressy, as a professor, are there ways in which you've used AI in the classroom or in educational spaces?
- [09:59]
Tressie McMillan Cottom
I am a critical social scientist, so what that means is I get to critique for a living. And so we use it for the purpose most often in my classroom anyway. We have used AI for the purpose of understanding it as what we call a socio technical system, meaning how are you going to use it and what are the risks of using it? What are some of the latent assumptions in the technology that may reinforce existing inequalities or produce new inequalities? So one of my favorite assignments, which I've actually done for several years, is a sort of hunt and find mission. And I tell them at the beginning of the semester that I would like them to figure out what their data rights are. As a university student, I want them to document the process of how they found out what their data rights are. And then I want them to document what technology they are expected to use in the everyday routine completion of their educational work, their educational assignments. And so we spent all semester trying to figure out how does something like AI use the data that students put into it, every time you upload a paper for AI to rewrite, every time you prompt with details of an assignment that goes in to someone's machine. And so one of the assignments we do all semester long is a conversation about the ethical and legal trade offs of convenience vis a vis what we give up in privacy. And one of the things that I love about this assignment is that I'm the professor, so I'm cheating, right? I created it. I know that it's almost impossible for them to answer it, but it is important for them to learn the lack of transparency in every layer of technology that is introduced into an organization, into a school system, every time we layer another technology on, it gets harder and harder for the student to understand what they are responsible for and what rights today are giving up. And I would say that of all the EdTech innovations that we have unveiled over the last 10, 15 years in teaching in higher education, in my experience, AI is the most opaque and therefore to me is one of the most troubling as far as, you know, shifting risk and responsibility on to vulnerable students, making it difficult for them to find a solution when AI is wrong. Something we almost never talk about, who's responsible when AI is wrong and what responsibility we have to putting something into the system that has a vast amount of like, complicated outcomes for the environment, for inequality, and why institutions would push us into doing that. So I use it, but mostly in service of critiquing it.
- [12:41]
Meher Ahmad
And how have you seen the reaction from your students? Because I imagine for your younger generations, like adopting this technology without giving it much thought can be enticing, especially if their peers are using it consistently. So yeah, how's that been?
- [12:55]
Tressie McMillan Cottom
Is not only enticing, there are a lot of incentives for them to use it. I Mean, one of the things that happens when technology becomes the epicenter of the culture is that it is cool. And there's so much anxiety right now around whether or not you chose the right major, whether you're gonna graduate on time, whether you're gonna get the good job, that being a part of the vanguard of technology just seems like a no brainer for most students. And by now many of them are coming to college having been immersed in that anxiety in K through 12. One of the saddest stories for me as an educator is about four years ago, all of my incoming students started reporting that they've had a LinkedIn account since they were in middle school. I was horrified. I was horrified and they didn't understand why I was horrified. So we had this whole story about, you know, we had this whole conversation about, well, what does that mean? How you've been managing your professional profile since you were 13, like, what have we done to you? But that's how they're kind of showing up in higher education and how they and technology. So for many of them, my class might be the first opportunity they've ever had where they have been invited to think about the technology, not just use it, not just adopt it, not just become really good at it, so that they don't fall behind, you know, but to actually think about it. So it opens up all these wonderful questions that I hope gives them a lens to consider. Not just AI after they leave my classroom, but whatever comes after AI, because there'll always be a new wave of technology that promises a shinier future while hiding the risk and the trade offs. So they tend to be very enthusiastic about it and terrified, I might say, very scared.
- [14:33]
Meher Ahmad
It's interesting that like a lot of people are concerned about AI deadening critical thinking skills, but it sounds like by taking their critical thinking skills and applying it towards AI directly that you've kind of figured out this loophole in the, in the system to get people to engage with this topic without necessarily feeling like they need to use it to outsource their thinking because they're talking about the AI itself.
- [14:58]
Tressie McMillan Cottom
I gotta say, what Jess described in the professors that responded to her about how they're using AI is very consistent for me of having watched especially humanities and social science professors over the last 15 years adopt to the rapidly changing technological environment in education. It is always stunning to me when I read an article or a piece of research or listen to a politician describe academics and professors as being Luddites, being resistant to technology. Because what Jessica describes is actually Very typical for my professional field, things like the digital humanities. Is the humanities responding to the fact that technology is inevitable and that there is always going to be a place for humanistic inquiry and learning? And I think that's what Jessica's seeing in people's responses.
- [15:47]
Jessica Gross
Absolutely. Especially in the sort of post Covid moment where the students who are now college students lost out on really important years of socialization, and they see those as skills to be built back up. And so critical thinking is certainly part of it, and writing skills are certainly part of it, but public speaking, interacting with community. And I keep coming back to the interacting with the community because something that I find so depressing is the loss of trust in higher education that has happened over the past several decades. And there's been obviously a concerted effort by the right wing to put down higher education and sow doubt about its utility. And so I think having students be more directly involved with the communities around the schools can only be positive, both for the students themselves, but also the surrounding community and the feelings of trust in higher education writ large.
- [16:48]
Meher Ahmad
So one question I did have about just the degree to which this technology is novel or different from other kind of tech that's existed prior to this. SparkNotes has always been a thing. Students have always tried to find shortcuts to summarize dense books. Is this markedly different when it does that? Maybe. Tressy, if you want to talk to that first.
- [17:08]
Tressie McMillan Cottom
Yeah. Jessica points to something that is just fundamental in the scientific research of the very messy process of how we learn. And that is learning is fundamentally a social process. It is what we would call relational. It happens within the context of relationships. So when you would read the Spark Notes for the Canterbury Tales, which was admittedly maybe my introduction to Spark Notes, many, many, many, many years ago, one of the things that happened there is that one you had to actually go physically buy it was a physical piece of media. There was a culture there that said to you the same thing that the physical media said to you. This is not a relationship. This is not a person telling me this. We know for a fact that we tend to trust information, or more likely to trust especially novel information, when it feels like we get that information in a relationship. That's why when you just kind of go to the library to answer a question, when all else fails you, what do you do? You go to the librarian. Right. Because what we want is a human being to help us make sense of what we don't know. With SparkNotes, that's not a risk. Right. You know that the book is not interactive. You know, that it is not intended to be something that you necessarily trust like you would a teacher or a librarian. I think the risk of AI is that it shrouds what is fundamentally just summaries, right. Of commonly held interpretations of the text, but it delivers it in a way that feels relational. So that's why when you see these horror stories, which admittedly right now are still extreme use cases, but these horror stories of people who think that they have fallen in love with their AI or they reanimate a dead loved one as an AI, the risk of that is that your brain actually doesn't do a great job of parsing when the computer voice is a computer versus when it is a human voice. I think that is just a. A fundamentally different vehicle for delivering information that AI hasn't earned. AI doesn't deserve the trust that we give human beings when it comes to information that it gives us. And in fact, it can't earn that trust because it's not human. So that, to me, is the risk.
- [19:24]
Meher Ahmad
I mean, it's interesting with the SparkNotes example, because ultimately humans were involved in writing the SparkNotes as well. And, Jess, you wrote this in one of your pieces, that there was a teacher that set an example where students were meant to research prophets. And the AI told one of the students that Moses got chocolate stains out of a T shirt, maybe instead of like Moses getting water out of a rock. And because they're young, they don't know to question that because they maybe don't know that Moses got water out of a rock instead of chocolate out of a T shirt. What was that story there? And what do you make of that?
- [19:57]
Jessica Gross
So obviously the hallucinations are still happening and just simply incorrect information. So those are two, honestly different things hallucinations are. The AI is just making something up. Incorrect information is. Its sources are often incorrect. It is only as good as the sources that it's pulling from. But I would say what I find most disturbing is that in some situations, you are having students use ChatGPT or any other chatbot to write the paper. They are then handing it into a professor who is using AI to grade the paper. And it's like, well, what are we even doing here anymore? You know, this is bots talking to bots. No one's getting anything out of it. And I do think if we're going to say a positive outcome of this new technology is that I hope it forces educational systems to sit back and say, what are the values? We are trying to inculcate in these students? Why are we here? What do we hope that they learn? What do we hope that is happening in the classroom? And I think that can lead to, honestly, really magical and inspiring things. I mean, reporting this story made me want to go back to college because I feel like I would get more out of it now when I was not 20 years old and choosing my classes based on whether there was a cute boy who had registered for it. So you know what? I think that there's still a great desire among both students and professors to have a really engaged experience and not just be bonded bots talking to bots to get a degree.
- [21:38]
Meher Ahmad
It sounds like you're both in agreement that AI erodes a lot of these skills that are beyond just rote memorization of facts and information. Part of academic knowledge is learning how to read and critically analyze information and discern for yourself what's right and wrong. But I'm curious that now that we're living in a world where the genie's out of the bottle and a lot of students and younger people are using AI, like, what are other ways that these skills can be learned in the classroom?
- [22:07]
Tressie McMillan Cottom
Yeah. You know, perhaps one of the biggest threats that AI poses to education isn't that it's gonna make educators useless, but that it is going to make educators so much more necessary than we are willing to invest in. AI actually makes it more important that we have everything from librarians to counselors to teachers to professors to researchers who can put this rapidly changing information environment into context. Into context, and can develop the capacity in students to make sense of things. Right. So the skillset that you get when you can make mundane tasks automated, when you can outsource them to technology, as AI promises to do, is that then human beings are left to do arguably the higher order work of making sense of things. The problem is learning the basic skill was a stepping stone to learning how to make sense of things. Right. So the challenge there is that AI hollows out the foundation of learning because it kind of strips you, you know, gets rid of the mistakes, it gets rid of the opportunities for serendipity. There's nothing that AI does that human beings not only do better, but I think, can fundamentally make more sense of. And so the task for us, I think, is just to create opportunities for that to happen in schools and universities.
- [23:31]
Meher Ahmad
Yeah. I mean, one thing Tressy, you touched on a little bit, but for us being in an older generation of Internet users and kind of being at a different stage in our lives, our concerns about AI seem to stand in contrast to Gen Z and younger people's concerns about AI, just especially because you're, you know, you write about this topic often. Like, how do you see their attitudes towards it? Is there panic and concern with younger people or are they more willing to kind of just wholesale adopt this technology?
- [24:02]
Jessica Gross
So it's real range Gen Z. They clearly are suspicious, but the allure of it is still strong. And they are incredibly worried, as Tressie said, about getting jobs, which they should be. The market is not good for entry level jobs, especially white collar jobs. But also some of them have a lot of pride. And some of the professors I talked to said their students were offended at the idea that they would ever use AI to do their creative work because they had real pride in what they were doing and real, you know, love for whatever the creative pursuit that they were doing.
- [24:38]
Tressie McMillan Cottom
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So much of this is driven by fear and anxiety and not those positive emotions that Jessica mentions, which I love hearing because I. One of the things we don't talk about enough is how many emotions are tied up in being a learner, in risking acquiring new information. We always, we tend to remember the satisfaction of having learned something, but we forget how difficult and challenging it can be to your identity to learn something new, right? To risk it, to fail, to take pride and want it to turn out great. Like all of those emotions are actually kind of part of the whole process. And I will say again that when AI takes out all of those emotional feedback loops that help learning happen, it's actually not enabling learning. And just knowing a fact is not the same as learning. And that we are denying young people that, that experience, the pride of having acquired skill, talent and ability is for me just so sad. Our poverty of imagination about the human spirit here really gets me down. But also I think it's important for us to keep in mind how these systems work on a behavioral level, by design, right? And here's the thing. Kids aren't supposed to have that much willpower, right? The fact that we would put this down to, well, if you don't want to use the AI, don't use it is shifting the responsibility to the exact wrong place, right? Kids aren't supposed to be able to resist a highly sophisticated, research informed platform designed to make you use it. It is incumbent upon us, the adults, the society, to figure out what's the right amount of risk to expose kids to. I think they actually want more guardrails. I think they are craving the positive feelings that come along with learning, but they aren't supposed to be able to. To resist it. We are supposed to do that for them. And I think sometimes we forget that or we just totally abdicate our responsibility in doing that.
- [26:32]
Meher Ahmad
We started our conversation by getting a temperature check on how you feel about AI being used by students, specifically in higher education. You guys are both a two. But I'm curious, what would need to change for that to come closer to a 10 for you?
- [26:47]
Tressie McMillan Cottom
Oh, that's tough. That's tough. So I always like to remind people, you know, sociologists are not fortune tellers. But okay, so if I could. I always think that the potential for any technology gets better if it is submitted to democratic rule. So in the case of AI, one of our big what if questions is, who's in charge of that thing? Right? So if AI causes some great harm, if AI did something wrong, who do we call to misquote the Ghostbusters? And if we don't know who to call, that usually is a sign that there is not enough democratic oversight of the technology, and we start shoehorning it in everything from our government to our social policy to our schools to our health care. That's a really big question. I mean, I inch it up to a three. You know, a three, maybe a four. If what we were talking about here is building some system of regulation and oversight that did weigh the risks against the possible rewards, that would make me feel better.
- [27:50]
Meher Ahmad
Better.
- [27:52]
Jessica Gross
I agree. Any regulation at all at this point would. I would want.
- [27:58]
Tressie McMillan Cottom
To take anything.
- [27:59]
Jessica Gross
Our federal government has signaled that they have zero appetite for regulating AI and they just see it as a power struggle with China and who's going to be first. And the guard rails are completely off. So, you know, any manner of regulation. And then I would say also, if it is going to be used by young people having systems that are built specifically with their needs in mind, I would trust those systems a little bit more. And so I just worry about anything right now that even promotes itself as a child. First educational technology using AI because a lot of the people doing it will say, oh, we have all these credentials and whatever and are just, you know, yeah, yeah, have no proof behind it, have no research, because the speed of adoption is what is prioritized rather than finding out if it actually works and is useful.
- [28:54]
Meher Ahmad
So big, big grains of salt, Big rocks of salt to these. I was about to say addendums.
- [28:59]
Jessica Gross
Yeah, yeah.
- [29:00]
Tressie McMillan Cottom
Pretty big. I'm gonna go with boulders of salt.
- [29:04]
Meher Ahmad
Well, that's a good place to end our conversation. Thank you both. This has been a really fascinating conversation.
- [29:09]
Jessica Gross
And until the next time, thanks for having us.
- [29:13]
Tressie McMillan Cottom
Thank you.
- [29:32]
Unknown Host
If you like this show, follow it on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. The Opinions is produced by Derek Arthur, Vishaka Darby, Christina Samulewski, and Gillian Weinberger. It's edited by Kari Pitkin and Alison Bruzek. Engineering, mixing and original music by Isaac Jones, sonia Herrero, Pat McCusker, Carol Sabaro, and Afim Shapiro. Additional music by Aman Sahota. The Fact Check team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker and Michelle Harris. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Christina Samulewski. The director of Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser.
- [30:17]
Meher Ahmad
You can also find us in the New York Times app. Download the app and tap Listen at the bottom of the screen to find us and all other New York Times shows and narrated article.