I Don’t Want AI to Do My Thinking

It’s been only two years since I first heard a teacher warn students not to cheat using AI. Since then, as I’ve learned more, it seems so obviously wrong and contrary to education itself. It strikes me as an attack on thinking, because AI can read the book for you and then write your essay about it. 

It also steals from artists and gives them no credit for their work. It’s terrible for the environment, using up huge amounts of energy and draining local water supplies. I recoiled from it and resolved never to use AI. 

Through the grapevine over the last few years, I heard that some students were using AI to write their essays or cheat on quizzes, but few of my friends did. Teachers began to threaten to put our work through AI checkers, and some had us hand-write essays, but school mostly stayed what it had always been: a place where I learn to think alongside other students excited to learn, guided by teachers who also liked to think.   

But in the last month of my sophomore year, my literature teacher took a different approach. Assigning a final creative project about the character of Henry in the Shakespeare play The Life of Henry the Fifth, also known as Henry V, she asked us to use some kind of artistic skill to convey our impressions of Henry. I had been appalled by the pro-war sentiments Shakespeare weaved into Henry V and was excited about the opportunity to voice these criticisms through art.

Then the teacher said, “And you are allowed to use AI for this project if it will make it better.” 

This teacher was easily influenced, and sometimes changed her mind. I knew I didn’t want to use AI, but I also didn’t want to ruin what sounded like an easy A for everyone. Fortunately, a few classmates expressed the same dismay and confusion I felt.

“Are you sure? As in ChatGPT?” a girl asked.

“Yes, I suppose so, as long as the idea is yours. I’m not grading you on artistic skill,” the teacher answered.

“So we can use AI to make a picture, or write text or make a slideshow, if it’s our idea originally?” 

“Yes.”

“But how do you know the idea is ours?”

“I don’t understand what all the confusion is about. The point of this project is to come up with an idea. You will not be graded on your execution of it,” she explained, raising her voice.

I was annoyed. It was one thing for my peers to use AI to make study guides, generate essay outlines or make flashcards, because it seemed to make it easier for them to learn, despite the environmental cost. But for a teacher to tell us to use it to do our work felt much worse. It felt antithetical to education itself; promoting AI in school felt like asking students to use AI instead of our own minds for creativity and critical analysis.

I like learning in an organic way, with other people, sometimes even away from my computer. For the Henry V project, I had the idea to link Henry’s St. Crispin’s Day speech urging the English soldiers into battle to the films of Leni Riefenstahl, a talented filmmaker who made Nazi propaganda about the 1936 Olympics as idealistic depictions of conflict. Henry used masculine language and rhetoric to justify slaughter in a way that reminded me of war propaganda. I contrasted those two with more truthful depictions of conflict from photojournalism by Magnum photographers.

I learned about Leni Riefenstahl not from AI but from my friend Nicky, who first took me to The Strand bookstore’s photography section. He showed me Larry Clark’s Tulsa, Robert Mapplethorpe’s The Black Book, a book of David Lynch film stills, and a book about Riefenstahl. We spent an hour in the bookstore discussing propaganda, nationalism, and nature vs. nurture. 

In Henry V, Shakespeare wrote a complex deconstruction of war, while also meeting social pressures to write a patriotic play. Riefenstahl’s objective in capturing images in Germany under Hitler was to stoke German nationalism and idealism. So there were big differences between the two, and I don’t consider my project my best work, but I was happy I got to think about and use something my friend had taught me and teach it to other people. 

Many of my friends at Bard HS share my disdain for AI. Only one kid I know of ended up using AI for that project, to generate an image of a battle scene that showed Henry as victorious, and had war imagery and symbolism in the background. It was OK, but nothing he couldn’t have done better by hand.

Zach’s Class

Next year, my junior year, I was allowed to choose most of my classes. (At Bard Early College HS, we start college classes in 11th grade.) I kept hearing raves from older students about Modern Japanese Fiction with Zach. My friend’s sister said, “If you do one thing at Bard, take a class taught by Zach.” 

So I did, and she was right: It’s the most exciting class I’ve ever taken. All Zach’s classes are discussion-based, and we often read an entire book in one week. We only meet twice a week, but for every class we write a page-long reading response plus a page of quotes and questions. We mark the books with Post-Its, and at the beginning of class Zach flips through everyone’s pages to check Post-Its. Those conversations spilled out of the classroom, into our breaks and even after school. To me, the class distills much of what I love about learning— and what AI threatens to destroy. 

Zach’s respect and engagement with each of us helped make the discussions feel like our ideas were valued, and everyone contributed.

One of my favorite sessions was on A Personal Matter by Kenzaburo Oe. The novel is about a teacher, Bird, whose child was born with a brain hernia. The book takes place over the first week of the child’s life, during which Bird wrestles with taking“it” (which is how Bird refers to his son) off life support. Bird, an alcoholic who had been in recovery, goes on a days-long, self-loathing bender with his mistress, leaving his wife and child alone in the hospital. 

 Bird complains about his life incessantly; half of the class loved the book and half hated it. Zach volunteered me to start the class discussion with a question.

I ventured, “Is Bird a good person? He basically says he deserves to be condemned in eternity. He despises his own body for being weak and critiques his own social interactions in his narration. And it’s pretty terrible what he did, trying to let his kid die. But by the end he seems deeply remorseful.”

The guy sitting across from me said, “I think he tries to allow the child to die because he has so much self-loathing, and he projects that onto the kid. So maybe his self-destructive actions in the book are mixed up for him with wanting the child to die. I don’t think that redeems him, but it makes him more sympathetic to me at least.”

Zach interjected, “That’s very good. I think that while Bird’s character is an important question, it might be better to focus on something specific to help us answer it.” This was what Zach often did, steering us toward specific symbols, deepening our appreciation of how the writing worked and the layers in it.

Discussion ranged over lots of symbols, including a violent arcade game where Bird pins a woman’s arms back. We find out that Bird raped Himiko when they were in college and felt sad and pathetic afterwards.  Bird refers to Himiko’s breasts as “broad, flat and somehow stolid.” Elsewhere he brings up images of women with their breasts cut off. 

“Bird even describes Himiko as a small man masquerading as a woman at one point,” someone pointed out.

We talked about femininity being represented by breasts, which give life. So when he and Himiko try to let the baby die by giving it sugar water instead of breast milk, we in class initially thought that masculinity must signify death countering femininity/life, but as we discussed the specific text, it seemed more like death represented escape.

For the rest of the double period we went from symbol to symbol, analyzing each one, with Zach guiding us towards the most important things. By the end, everyone felt they had a strong grasp of the text, and most left enjoying the book a lot more. We went from just thinking of Bird as sad or “annoying” to contemplating what can drive a person to be like Bird. Zach told us that Oe himself had a son with a brain hernia. 

Some of my classmates wondered if Oe wrote the book to explore some of his darker thoughts about having a child with a disability. More interesting to me was Bird’s movement from thinking he can escape his own self-loathing by asserting power to realizing that raping women or killing his child will not allow him to escape himself. 

Vigilance 

Some version of these discussions happened every week, and we were all inspired. Zach’s standards are high but realistic, and he holds himself to them. His books were as full of Post-Its as ours were. He sends each student 10-minute voice memos of thoughtful feedback about every essay we submit. It was nothing like checking off items on a rubric. Zach’s respect and engagement with each of us helped make the discussions feel like our ideas were valued, and everyone contributed.   

Few teachers in the school were more vigilant about keeping AI out of school than Zach. At the beginning of the semester he passed around notecards, asking each of us to write our ideas for controlling AI use without ruining the class. I didn’t have very much to say. I hate AI, but I didn’t think anything could stop it efficiently. 

The next time our class met he announced that, based in part on our feedback, all of our written work would be done in-class with pen and paper, to a prompt we wouldn’t get until arriving in class that day. Then he found an app that locks a computer onto one screen for a certain amount of time, essentially turning it into a typewriter. There would also be short multiple choice and short answer quizzes to test our comprehension and attentiveness during discussions. Even if you wanted to use AI in his class (which no one did), you couldn’t. 

I love the group discussions and our engagement in his class. I immersed myself in books I never thought I’d read and got so much out of our discussions. I always walked out of Modern Japanese Fiction with a new understanding of other people that I gained from character analysis, and the world around me by extension. My classmates and I were learning how to think. 

In Zach’s class, school felt like so much more than a stepping stone to a credential or a job. I fear that classes like his will disappear as AI takes over.