More on AI, Student Learning and Human Flourishing

One of the great things about last semester’s sabbatical is that I didn’t have to think about making my assignments harder to outsource to AI chatbots, such as ChatGPT. I did start collecting what others have to say about how Generative AI harms student learning.

Matteo Wong, writing for The Atlantic, puts it well:

A car that accelerates instead of braking every once in a while is not ready for the road. A faucet that occasionally spits out boiling water instead of cold does not belong in your home. Working properly most of the time simply isn’t good enough for technologies that people are heavily reliant upon. And two and a half years after the launch of ChatGPT, generative AI is becoming such a technology. ... Generative AI is a technology that works well enough for users to become dependent, but not consistently enough to be truly dependable. ... For now, the technology’s flaws are readily detected and corrected. But as people become more and more accustomed to AI in their life—at school, at work, at home—they may cease to notice. Already, a growing body of research correlates persistent use of AI with a drop in critical thinking; humans become reliant on AI and unwilling, perhaps unable, to verify its work.  

Alan Jacobs, from whom I got several of these links, agrees:

“Yes, students understand — they understand quite well, and vocally regret — that when they use chatbots they are not learning much, if anything.”

The problem, according to Jacobs, is that in today’s universities, “the acquisition of knowledge” competes with the desire for a good job and the desire for a good time. Students turn to AI because they value the “university experience” and the diploma more than education.

According to Jonathan Malesic, Generative AI apps, such as ChatGPT, are gimmicks that falsely promise a shortcut in place of the hard work that true teaching and learning requires:

“I have found, to overcome students’ resistance to learning, you often have to trick them. There’s the old bait-and-switch of offering grades, then seeing a few students learn to love learning itself. Worksheets are tricks, as are small-group discussions and even a teacher’s charisma. … I don’t know anyone for whom it’s a straightforward task. It’s the challenge for any teacher, and AI offers a tempting illusion to students—and evidently to some teachers—that there could be a shortcut. ... Part of a teacher’s job—certainly in the humanities, but even in professional fields like business—is to help students break out of their prisons, at least for an hour, so they can see and enhance the beauty of their own minds. ... I will sacrifice some length of my days to add depth to another person’s experience of the rest of theirs. ... The work is slow. Its results often go unseen for years. But it is no gimmick.”  

More than a gimmick, GenAI tools and the companies that produce them are actively hostile to learning:

Josh Eyler as quoted in CHE: “Learning is very hard work. It’s a deeply complex process …. If you offload onto AI the very cognitively demanding aspects of the learning process, then like a muscle atrophying, you’re weakening that process over time.” 

Joss Fong as quoted in CHE: “Education researchers have this term ‘desirable difficulties,’ which describes this kind of effortful participation that really works but also kind of hurts. And the risk with AI is that we might not preserve that effort, especially because we already tend to misinterpret a little bit of struggling as a signal that we’re not learning.” 

Lucas Ropek in “Multiple Studies Now Suggest That AI Will Make Us Morons”: “[T]he conclusion that using an app to complete a homework assignment makes you less capable of thinking for yourself would appear to be self-evident. Outsourcing mental duties to a software program means you’re not performing those duties yourself, and, as is pretty well established, doing something yourself is often the best way to learn.” 

James D. Walsh in New York Magazine: “It’ll be years before we can fully account for what all of this is doing to students’ brains. Some early research shows that when students off-load cognitive duties onto chatbots, their capacity for memory, problem-solving, and creativity could suffer. Multiple studies published within the past year have linked AI usage with a deterioration in critical-thinking skills; one found the effect to be more pronounced in younger participants.”

And, in the best thing I’ve read on the topic, Megan Fritts writes:

“[T]he work that we bypass when using a calculator is less important than what we bypass when using an AI language generator for writing. To be a human self, a human agent, is to be a linguistic animal. … [T]o learn to use language just is to learn how to think and move about in the world. When we stop doing this—when our needs for communication are met by something outside of us, a detached mouthpiece to summon, describe and regale—the intimate connection between thought and language disappears. It is not only the capacity for speech that we will slowly begin to lose under such conditions, but our entire inward lives. ... [T]he real threat AI poses is not one of job replacement or grading frustration or having to reimagine assignments but something entirely different. ... [L]anguage-generating AI, whether it is utilized to write emails or dissertations, stands as an enemy to the human form of life by coming between the individual and her words. ... Preserving art, literature and philosophy will require no less than the creation of an environment totally and uncompromisingly committed to abolishing the linguistic alienation created by AI, and reintroducing students to the indispensability of their own voice.”

In sum, indiscriminate use of Generative AI—as encouraged by the likes of Microsoft, Google and OpenAI—is inimical to learning and antithetical to human flourishing.

For my earlier reflections on Gen AI and education, see On Creativity, ChatGPT, and Doing Your Chores. 

 

Recommended Reading on Israel, Palestine, and the War on Gaza

Two novels shaped my earliest thinking about the formation of the state of Israel. I read James Michener’s The Source (Random House, 1965) and Leon Uris’s Exodus (Doubleday, 1958) in boarding school at Rift Valley Academy (ca. 1986-89). Equally influential from a Palestinian perspective, was a memoir, Elias Chacour’s Blood Brothers (Chosen, 1984), which I read in Canada in grade 11 (1989-90). By the time I left for a year of study in Israel in the summer of 2000, I had also read Thomas Friedman’s From Beirut to Jerusalem (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1989) and, I’m ashamed to say, not much else about Israel or Palestine. 

Living in Jerusalem gave me a front row seat on the beginning of the second intifada. From the Hebrew University’s Mount Scopus campus, we could see evidence of the violence unfolding on the Temple Mount. From our apartment in West Jerusalem, we could hear the Israeli army shelling Bethlehem. And we tried not to think too much about suicide bombers when we boarded a city bus. 

Personal experience can lull you into thinking you know what you are talking about, but does not qualify you to speak with any sort of competence. To understand a region’s present, you must learn about its past. Although I tried to keep an eye on current events, I did little to educate myself about Israel’s immediate past in the years that followed, except for a couple audiobooks. I listened to Amos Oz’s memoir, A Tale of Love and Darkness (Harcourt, 2005), in 2018 while cycling to and from a research library in Cambridge. Ari Shavit’s My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel (Spiegel & Grau, 2013), which I “read” in 2016, filled in the picture through the early 2000’s. 

News about Hamas’s brutal attack on Oct 7, 2023 and Israel’s inevitable response was too painful to follow closely after the initial shock. I also didn’t want to read anything shrill or reactionary ... and I thought I knew something about the conflict. 

I knew I knew nothing about Ukraine, however, so earlier this year I listened to Serhii Plokhy’s, The Russo-Ukrainian War: The Return of History (Norton, 2024), which had been recommended as a reliable primer on the geo-politics of Ukraine, including Russia’s 2014 and 2022 invasions. On the analogy of Ukraine, where my ignorance is complete, I finally decided to look for an audiobook related to the conflict in Israel and the occupied territories. 

• I began with Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017 (Metropolitan Books, 2020). Khalidi hails from a prominent Palestinian family with centuries-long ties to Jerusalem. Before retiring in 2024, he was the Edward Said professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University. The picture Khalidi paints of Israeli colonialism and American collusion between 1917-2017 is deeply troubling. Critical reviews of the book sometimes take issue with Khalidi’s framing of the conflict in colonial terms, but I am not aware of any that dispute the facts he has assembled. To my surprise, I found Khalidi more even-handed than Plokhy, who understandably, and rightly, makes a case for Ukrainian national identity.

• I turned from Khalidi’s Palestinian perspective to Peter Beinart’s just-releasted Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning (Knopf, 2025). Beinart addresses his own anti-Zionist criticism of Israel’s war on Gaza to an insider Jewish audience. His argument is measured and, to my mind, compelling. It is also theological: The biblical prophets, Beinart suggests, would have had something to say about a Jewish exceptionalism that presents itself as always the victim and never the perpetrator:

“From the destruction of the Second Temple to the expulsion from Spain to the Holocaust, Jews have told new stories to answer the horrors we endured. We must now tell a new story to answer the horror that a Jewish country has perpetrated, with the support of many Jews around the world. Its central element should be this: We are not history’s permanent virtuous victims. We are not hardwired to forever endure evil but never commit it. That false innocence, which pervades contemporary Jewish life, camouflages domination as self-defense. It exempts Jews from external judgment. It offers infinite license to fallible human beings.” (10) 

“The legitimacy of a Jewish state—like the holiness of the Jewish people—is conditional on how it behaves. It is subject to law, not a law in and of itself (100). 

Blanket support for the state of Israel is, according to Beinart, a form of idolatry. Christian Zionist readers predisposed to support Israel without criticism should take note.

I have learned enough, I hope, to disclaim competence or punditry. But if you are at all concerned about current events in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank, I recommend starting with Beinart and moving from there to Khalidi—perhaps especially if your political orientation tends to differ from theirs. (For an Israeli perspective, try Shavit.)

If you have recommendations of your own, feel free to share them in the comments.

On Reading Biblical Hebrew: Advice for Beginners

My advice for students with a year of Biblical Hebrew under their belts who want to launch out on their own:

(1) Read & listen through the passage at least once without stopping to identify forms and unfamiliar words.

• A high-quality recording produced by the Bible Society in Israel can be streamed or downloaded at Bible.is. (The recording is in a modern Israeli pronunciation, which means that distinctions between vocal and silent shewas are not always maintained, etc.)

• Another more traditional recording narrated by Abraham Shmueloff can be accessed here: https://www.torahclass.com/audio-bible-in-hebrew.

(2) Look up unfamiliar forms:

• StepBible provides parsing and an abridged lexicon. (You will want to switch the Bible from ESV to THOT. You can do that manually, or click here: https://www.stepbible.org/?q=version=THOT.)

• Full versions of the standard (dated but still valuable) Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon can be searched online here:

  • http://www.2letterlookup.com/

  • http://www.ericlevy.com/revel/bdb/bdb/main.htm

(3) Read and Re-read until you can understand the text without looking up forms. I recommend a 1-2-3 reading process. For example, read Genesis 1:1-2 on day 1, Genesis 1:1-2 + 1:3-4 on day 2, and Genesis 1:3-4 + 1:5-6 on day 3. This way each reading will include review and new material.

Finally, some general advice:

• Stay humble. You have learned enough Hebrew to be dangerous.
• Be patient with yourself. There is lots more to learn.
• Form a habit. Reading a little Hebrew regularly is much better than grand ambitions that never get off the ground.
• Don’t stop.
• Have fun!

Early Judaism Video Lecture: From Alexander to Antiochus IV

This video, the fourth in a series of lectures I recorded in the fall of 2020, offers a big picture overview of Greek rule in Judaea from the death of Alexander the Great to the conquest of the Levant by the Seleucid king Antiochus III (ca. 323 BCE - 198 BCE). I also introduce the concept of “Hellenization.”

It’s riveting, I assure you, but best watched at 1.5 - 2x speed. 

See this post for more information as well as links to other video lectures in the series.

Major secondary sources / influences:

Cohen, Shaye. From the Maccabees to the Mishnah. 3rd ed. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2014.

Nickelsburg, George W. E. Jewish Literature Between the Bible and the Mishnah: A Historical and Literary Introduction. 2nd ed. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005.

Rainey, Anson F., and R. Steven Notley. The Sacred Bridge: Carta’s Atlas of the Biblical World. Jerusalem: Carta, 2006.

Schwartz, Seth. The Ancient Jews from Alexander to Muhammad. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

Schwartz, Seth. Imperialism and Jewish Society, 200 B.C.E. to 640 C.E. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001.

Tcherikover, Victor. Hellenistic Civilization and the Jews. Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1999.

 

On Creativity, ChatGPT, and Doing Your Chores

Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

I recently attended a virtual presentation by Bart Caylor on “Leveraging AI for Your Marketing and Recruitment Efforts.” Caylor’s basic message for higher education, including faculty, is: Get with the program or get left behind. Generative AI is a “neutral tool.” Everyone is using it. “Higher education has neither the ability nor the luxury to lag behind.” Luddites who try to resist the new technology are like math professors in the 1960’s protesting the use of calculators. As a fake quote attributed to Alvin Toffler puts it, “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”

If we don’t want to be left behind, we must pivot — unlearning and relearning — and embrace GenAI for our marketing, recruitment, leadership and teaching efforts. To be sure, there are challenges: Schools need to have a plan to respond to the inevitability of malign deep-fake videos, for instance. But there are also positive uses of deep-fake technology. Who wouldn’t want to watch a video of our college president extolling the virtues of the education we offer in flawless Russian or Klingon?

Caylor urges us to “lean into AI for chores.” Let AI do the reading, summarizing, brainstorming and speech-writing, so administrators and faculty members can focus on mentoring and relationships. AI can come up with grading rubrics too. AI-grading anyone?

In our new world, AI will take over chores that can be automated. This will mean jobs lost for people who can’t pivot fast enough. But humans will still be required to make decisions, and so Caylor envisages a “liberal arts resurgence” to help develop critical thinking skills—and this could lead to a bright future for colleges like my own.

I appreciate Caylor’s enthusiasm for the liberal arts, but I confess to wondering what he thinks it means. How does he imagine a liberal arts education will produce the creativity and critical thinking skills we need, if not by the reading and writing “chores” AI can supposedly replace?

Let me counter Caylor’s 1960’s math professor analogy with an example from sports. Attempting to outsource the “chores” of brainstorming and the hard work of crafting sentences to a large language model is like getting a robot to run your basketball drills so you can spend more time playing the game. With critical thinking as with any other skill, there is no substitute for practice. And the foundation of critical thinking is basic literacy. As David Brooks puts it:

“[L]iteracy is the backbone of reasoning ability, the source of the background knowledge you need to make good decisions in a complicated world. ... Writing is the discipline that teaches you to take a jumble of thoughts and cohere them into a compelling point of view.” 

In other words, Caylor and other AI cheerleaders miss the whole point of education. Our responsibility as teachers includes helping students learn what it means to work with their minds, and prompting them to forge the neural pathways that will enable them to think creatively and make difficult decisions. These critical thinking skills depend on the “chores” of reading and writing, and they are even more essential in a world where truth and lies are so thoroughly mixed together.

Because it offers an easy alternative to the hard work of thinking, GenAI makes the job of teaching way harder. GenAI gets in the way of learning; it stunts development. It is, in my view, a major threat to the basic literacy of reading and writing, as well as to the additional literacy of “learning how to learn” that Alvin Toffler really did call for in 1970:

“Students must learn how to discard old ideas, how and when to replace them. They must, in short, learn how to learn. ... By instructing students how to learn, unlearn and relearn, a powerful new dimension can be added to education. ... Psychologist Herbert Gerjuoy of the Human Resources Research Organization phrases it simply: ‘The new education must teach the individual how to classify and reclassify information, how to evaluate its veracity, how to change categories when necessary, how to move from the concrete to the abstract and back, how to look at problems from a new direction—how to teach himself. Tomorrow’s illiterate will not be the man who can’t read; he will be the man who has not learned how to learn.’” - Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (New York: Random House, 1970), 367.

This kind of literacy—one that assumes and builds on the literacy of reading and writing—is a pedagogical goal I can stand behind, but it is impeded not advanced by the uncritical adoption of our latest technology.

On Leisure

Alan Jacobs: “I think we’re living in the aftermath of a slow-motion cultural and moral apocalypse. I really do. I’m trying to keep some beautiful things alive for the people who are willing to encounter them and maybe even to love them.”

AKMA: “I want to note that almost everyone in today’s neoliberal economy has been squeezed for productivity like a lemon wedge until there’s little left but macerated pulp and skin. ... Everyone ought to benefit from the leisure, the slack time, that insulates workers from the parching, fraying, abrasive effects of unrelenting demands to extract more from our lives, all to the profit of the unimaginably wealthy. ... [O]ne way we can push back on this matrix of extraction can involve recognising and encouraging a clerical vocation of leisure (for the benefit of our cures, not for self-interest, though some will of course abuse that opportunity). ... Demand that real academic communities offer their teachers the time to ruminate, not just pump the human equivalent of AI slop into print month after month. ...”

Arthur C. Brooks in the Atlantic: “Leisure, in other words, is far from the modern notion of just chillin’. It is a serious business, and if you don’t do leisure well, you will never find life’s full meaning. Properly understood, leisure is the work you do for yourself as a person without an economic compulsion driving you. For Pieper, this work of leisure—no contradiction, in his view—would not involve such ‘acediac’ activities as scrolling social media and chuckling at memes, getting drunk, or binge-streaming some show. Rather, true leisure would involve philosophical reflection, deep artistic experiences, learning new ideas or skills, spending time in nature, or deepening personal relationships. ... Left to our educational experience and its basic assumptions, many of us naturally oscillate between being Homo economicus and Homo trivialus—in other words, a cycle of laborious slog by day and unproductive, numbing pleasure-pursuits in the evenings and at weekends. This is a culture of unenriching, unrelieved monotony. We have two ways to change this: One is through work; the other is through leisure. For many people, the former is not possible, at least not in the short run. But for everyone, leisure can be customized to make it enlivening, not deadening. How you use your leisure can be made to reflect your values and connect with other people in deeply meaningful ways.”

Great minds think alike.

Early Judaism Video Lectures

Five years ago, the college where I teach responded to the Covid pandemic by radically altering our regular semester schedule. To ensure flexibility in case an outbreak meant we had to switch everything online, our fourteen-week semester was divided into two more intensive seven-week terms, with daily classes but shorter class times to satisfy our Province’s restrictions on in-person meetings. (Chairs also had to be six feet apart, which meant that those of us with larger classes had to teach multiple sections.) Thankfully, we were still able to meet in person, students were obviously glad to be there, and the smaller class sizes and more intensive format helped contribute to the learning experience.

The big challenge for those of us who teach content-heavy courses was making up for lost lecture time. To solve this problem we were encouraged to “flip” our class format by pre-recording lectures and saving face-to-face class time for discussion. I have to say I hated this. The videos took an enormous amount of work, and the quality of what I produced was, I thought, very poor. 

In subsequent years, however, I have found myself returning to the videos I produced for my 300-level introduction to early Judaism course (“Jewish Backgrounds to Early Christianity”), sometimes to remind myself what I said in class and sometimes to require my students to watch specific videos as assigned “readings” when we get behind or to leave more room for discussion in class. 

The first few videos are indeed a wash. I won’t be posting them anywhere! But the quality does improve, the content is, I think, pretty good, and, if you speed up the video to at least 1.5x speed, you can get beyond my stilted delivery. It occurred to me that there might be some value in posting some of them to my YouTube channel and linking to them on this blog. 

I intend to keep this post updated as an index page as I upload more videos:

• From Alexander to Antiochus IV - A big picture overview of Greek rule in Judaea from ca. 323 BCE - 198 BCE, with a discussion of “Hellenization.”
• Purity and Impurity in Second Temple Judaism - This video, from about two-thirds of the way through the course, is on the ancient Jewish purity system. As it happens, I originally created a blog post about the video back in 2020. That post has been updated with a link to the YouTube version of the video. As I mention there, anyone interested in the topic should now subscribe to Logan Williams’ and Paul Sloan’s excellent “Jesus and Jewish Law” podcast.