Another Take on that Silly Chat Bot (or Death to the High School Essay)

I hold heterodox views on teaching writing. In brief, the way we teach writing in K-12 largely prepares students for further academia and not actual life. For example, I don’t use MLA (or APA) citations in my everyday life; you likely don’t either. I haven’t used them since grad school. When I want to cite a source, I use a hyperlink, occasionally a footnote.

When it comes to writing tasks, many teachers are obsessed with page and word counts. I try me best to avoid them. When I assign a task to a student, I tell them how many ideas or arguments they need to present, not how much to write. If a student can make a coherent argument for the abolition of the filibuster in the Senate, using two arguments, some evidence, and a counterclaim in 800 words, great! Oh, you need 1800 words? Fine. In the end, I care more about the ideas my students are interrogating than about the volume of writing they produce.

Writing instruction should ideally center on real-life use cases. They need opportunities to play with complex ideas rather than writing fewer, longer high-stakes pieces. I’ve been paid to write. Definitionally, I am a professional writer (don’t laugh). In all the occasions I have been paid to write something, it’s never been much more than 1000 words. If that’s good enough for Slate, it should be good enough for an IB/AP/A-Level comp class.

Now before you start erecting guillotines… Yes, students need to write and revise more often. Yes, they need to be taught to write for specific purposes and contexts (a wedding toast, a resume, a cover letter). But if a high school student can craft a coherent, thoughtful 1000 word essay, they’re in good shape. More isn’t better, it’s just more.

Lastly, almost all the writing my students do in class is hand-written, on-demand. I give them a prompt and some stimulus (a map, a data set, a passage from a primary source) and they go to town for the period. But in each class I teach, there’s usually also one longer, more formal essay each year where students are required to demonstrate more traditional essay skills. I really don’t enjoy reading or grading them, but I understand the exercise has some value.

The preceding was my philosophy on writing until last week when that silly chat bot rolled into room 157.

Real talk, I am never assigning another out of class essay as long as I live. Ain’t no way in hell I’m gonna throw away my evenings and Sunday afternoons trying to figure out if the essay I am reading is Charlie’s or a chatbot. Nope, nein, nada—that is for suckers. I ain’t no sucka.

But it’s bigger than that. The emergence of AI created content onto the mainstream of our society with essentially no public debate or government regulation is incredibly problematic. Even worse, Open AI, the creator of ChatGPT (this is the only time I will use the name of the bot in question because every time you mention them you’re advertising for them), was co-founded by the problematic richest man on the planet, Elon Musk. Even worse squared, another co-founder, Sam Altman, was behind a massive crypto scam, Worldcoin. It promised to provide a form of UBI by collecting iris scans from half a million people in developing states in exchange for a crypto token that now trades at $0.02221. I am not making this up—this is possibly the worst idea ever, carried out by the worst people possible.

To be clear:

I want nothing to do with it.

Burn it with fire.

Let it fall forever in the Mines of Moria with the Balrog that killed Gandalf.

If you think I am being extreme here, that’s okay. Most people I talk to about this topic say the same. I got called a luddite for this take on my own podcast Friday night.

Here’s the thing. Philosophically, when I am presented with a moral question, I assume the “most likely, worst case scenario” and work backwards in crafting my personal response and preferred public policy outcome. For example, should we arm teachers? Well, do you want a racist Karen teacher that “fears for her life” shooting a Black middle schooler? No? Me either. So that’s a rubbish idea. Next, do we want the coverage of the upcoming election to be a torrent of partisan AI crafted propaganda and foreign-funded AI disinformation? If your answer is no (and unless you’re a psycho or a libertarian tecno-triumphalist, the answer should be no), we have to ask ourselves how do we prevent this dystopian hellscape scenario from taking place?

That’s where my conversations about mainstreaming AI start. Some of these pieces coming out from teachers about how they plan to integrate the bots in their practice are the most naive non-sense I’ve read in my whole life. Obviously, AI and machine learning are coming and have a place in our future. But do we have to let some of the worst people on the planet implement it with literally no regulatory checks, foresight, and the absence of an inclusive societal discourse? That’s just silly but not as silly as assigning the same tired essay prompts in 2023.

In Defense of Gatekeepers and Screaming Loudly at Bigots

Sometimes I think the internet was a mistake. 

On its surface, the internet is a very silly concept. The idea that I, a curmudgeonly high school teacher, can have an audience the size of a newspaper or TV station in a mid-sized city is insane. I don’t think anyone deserves an unmediated channel to the entirety of humanity. The negative incentives and temptations are too enticing. Human brains and our ethical development as a species are too primitive for that much power. I have thought this for a while but ignored my inner-monologue for years.

I once had a full-blown panic attack and had to be talked down by a friend, when I saw that some ungodly number of people were viewing my tweets on a monthly basis. I didn’t take Twitter seriously—I still don’t. To me, it’s a glorified group chat, (with an audience). I often had to restrain myself (sometimes unsuccessfully) from making fart jokes. I always thought the idea that my tweets were generating interview requests from NPR and speaking invitations to be preposterous.  A sizable percentage of my tweets had typos. It became a running joke in my house, with my friend group, and the name of the new newsletter. I decided to walk away from Twitter (for the second time) on Halloween: Takes & Typos was born in November.  I think I am better for it and I am glad you’re along for the ride.

In the 90s when the internet hit the mainstream, there were a lot of breathless opinion pieces celebrating the “rise of the citizen journalists,” “the democratization of media,” and “the death of gatekeepers.” Each of those has yielded mixed, at best, results. Many of the “citizen journalists" are cranks, conspiracy theorists, or worse. The “democratization of media” has given scammers, propagandists, and fabulists massive platforms to grift or “monetize” their followers. “The death of gatekeepers” is similarly going poorly. The intervening thirty years have shown us that we need better gatekeepers—not their abolition. Gatekeepers kept schmucks and fascists on the fringes. What we needed in the 90s was someone to send Thomas Friedman or Ruth Marcus out to pasture, but what we got was Alex Jones’s InfoWars and anti-vaxx crunchy mommy blogs.

Another way the internet is a mistake is its ability to elevate bad faith arguments into the political mainstream. There is currently an ongoing, disingenuous public spat over the “free speech crisis.” Possibly the most tedious salvo in this discourse was  this unfortunate letter in Harper’s crying about the current “stifling atmosphere” regarding speech. Ask yourself, in the year of our Lord, two thousand and twenty-three, do you think people being unable to share their (terrible) opinions and beliefs is really a major societal issue? Do you feel censored or silenced in your life? That doesn't pass the smell test for me. 

The people crying about speech are what I term opinion elites: people previously able to opine on newspaper opinion pages and in university lecture halls, without any real rejoinder. But an upshot of the aforementioned “democratization of media” is that now when they publish nonsense takes (pick your poison: race science, transphobic TERF-ery, anti-immigration sentiments, or other reactionary apologetics), they get an earful from people they perceive as below them. They are unaccustomed to being told “sir/ma’am, your takes are abhorrent and here’s why…” en masse. This is the core of the speech crisis. We have a cadre of elites conflating people telling them "I don't like you or what you're saying" with "you don't have the right to say it." Speech is a two way street. Yelling “shut up you noxious bigot, you’re not welcome in this space” is impolite. But the right to do so is as sacred as the right to pen cornball columns in the paper of record.

Missing Home, Dreading Home

Here in the Dhabs, we are still on holiday break and won’t start back at school until the ninth. Friday, I met up with a friend from work—we’ll call him “Alex.” After my three hour afternoon jet-lag nap, I hit him up and we met for shisha. We went to Idioms, the local hookah spot and smoked and chatted for nearly four hours. He’s a friend, colleague, and Black educator from South Carolina. We talked for a spell about our families, the complications of distance, and our lives outside of the US. I am from Tacoma, Cascadian to a fault, but my roots, like his, are in the South. My father was born in Laurel, Mississippi in 1930. My grandfather plied his trade as a shoe shine man and the Army brought my father to Fort Lewis during the Korean War. My mom was born on a farm in Arkansas in 1940. My step-dad, who raised me, hailed from Houston. I think of myself as having a Southern ROM, but a Washington RAM & UI.  

“Alex” and I spent a long while chopping up the contradictions of our current lives. The UAE is firmly an authoritarian state, an absolute monarchy with hereditary rule. But we are both happy here, with an undeniable and shared sense of peace. I have tried to explain it elsewhere but I always come up short trying to convey the sense of dread that comes with being in the US. Racism and the threat of arbitrary violence (state violence or otherwise) are like a fanny pack of anxiety you carry your entire life. Literally, every institution in the US has racialized outcomes: lower life-expectancy, lower median income, lower credit access, higher rates of homelessness, higher rates of incarceration, higher infant mortality, ad infinitum. We know all this data, but you aren’t truly aware of the weight of it until you get the opportunity to take that bag off. My assorted travels exposed the pervasive baseline anxiety that racism creates in my life. The only time that I get the full benefit of “Americanness” (whatever that even means) is when I depart the US. 

With the recent acquittal of the clearly guilty Pierce County Sheriff and upcoming trial of the police that murdered Manuel Ellis in 2020, law enforcement back home is front of mind for me. Despite the years of protests, despite the narratives about police “having their hands tied” and “not being able to do their jobs,” US police killed more people last year than any year on record: 1,176 people, This equivalent to the population of the entire towns of Ruston, West Pasco, Ilwaco, or Waterville, Washington. Every encounter I have with US law enforcement, from airport customs to local police, is an awkward dance where I have to bury my fear and hide my contempt. When I encounter police abroad, I don’t feel anxious—I feel they’re generally there to help. When I encounter cops abroad, I usually assume they mean me no harm. When I drive in the UAE and pass a police car, I don’t start going through my “what if I get pulled over” mental checklist. 

It may seem contradictory, but when I am in the Gulf, I find myself missing friends, family, and my old haunts in Tacoma. But each time I’m in the States, I feel a deep sense of relief when it’s time to leave. I don’t know how to square those competing sentiments. I have fewer absolute freedoms living in a monarchical state, but I have a better quality of freedoms: I am free from fear. I am free from being hassled for existing. I am free to live my life on my own terms. 

When people ask “when are you coming home to stay?” I always demur. I can’t give a straight answer. This mental tug is largely why.