Trying to teach in the age of the AI homework machine

Summary

“Dover” (1975) by Deborah Remington, giving HAL 9000 vibes in the Phoenix Art MuseumLast summer I made the case for bringing the principle of Dune’s Butlerian Jihad — “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind” — to our broader discourse on AI. It seemed like a good way to bind together the various felt and thought objections to AI into a common credo. And a good way to distinguish between benign forms of so-called “AI” (spotting tumors, for instance) and the sycophantic imitations of humanity being peddled by the various broligarchs.Since then, this “hard no” movement against AI has started to take shape. For one the t-shirt game keeps getting better. Traps are being set on the internet to punish AI scrapers and poison datasets. The new Chicago pope bashed AI in his first big speech. Just in my literary corner of the world, anti-AI clauses are becoming standard in book contracts and magazine submission forms. A recent episode of AppleTV’s The Studio ended with a crowd at ComicCon — and Ice Cube — chanting “fuck AI.” Last week there was a WorldCon kerfuffle (sigh) over using ChatGPT in part of the panel selection process.(My WorldCon take is that, well intentioned though it was, feeding an AI a list of names and asking it to compile dossiers of their scandals and transgressions is a pretty dystopian use-case.)It’s clear that writers, artists, and others in that orbit increasingly view any amount of engagement with LLMs as a betrayal of creative class solidarity. The sentiment (which I’ve heard all the way from Tumblr teens to Pulitzer Prize winners) seems to be something like this:A famous panel from Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns.I’ve heard pushback about such anti-AI puritanism, the ways it’s just another case of social media mob culture. For me, this is where the Butlerian Jihad continues to be a fruitful metaphor. The Dune books are all about how holy wars and revolutions are not gentle or reasonable, how they can turn ugly, righteous...