Artificial Intelligence (A.I.), Christian Education & Human Dignity

Issue 141 Article

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by Mark Osler

Big money is pouring into the effort to convince us that A.I. can make everything better: Business presentations, sermons, teachers’ lesson plans, cooking—well, pretty much everything. But there is a risk to the soul in all this, both the soul of our own beings and the soul of our society. As someone whose vocation is rooted in faith, I’m compelled to throw a red flag of caution amid the cascade of marketing.

I recently attended a session on artificial intelligence and law school teaching at a large symposium. There was clearly a divide among those attending: Some were excited about the potential of A.I. to make teaching more efficient, while others were frustrated by students who used A.I. to write their assignments. The presenter eagerly showed off tools that allow a professor to use A.I. to first create prompts for a student essay, then grade the resulting efforts and offer comments on what could be improved. A voice behind me began to murmur. “So, where we’re at,” a woman said, “is that A.I. will prompt the students, the students will use A.I. to write the essay, and then A.I. will grade it?”

A long, still silence followed. What we were contemplating was a dystopian future where the professors didn’t teach and the students didn’t learn; instead, computers would simply simulate the entire educational dialectic. Not only is there no room for human dignity, but there is no real human involvement at all.

As a teacher at a faith-based institution, I found the prospect particularly disheartening. Our mission statement sets out an ambitious goal, instructing that “The University of St. Thomas School of Law, as a Catholic law school, is dedicated to integrating faith and reason in the search for truth through a focus on morality and social justice.” And here is the funny thing about that mission statement: People take it seriously. Actual disputes are resolved among the faculty by referring to it. Every year, we give out awards to those who live and work according to each principle. Sadly, none of it—faith, reason, truth, morality, social justice—is easily propelled by artificial intelligence, which is fundamentally amoral by design. It is a machine for brutal efficiency.

A.I. enthusiasts argue that it can make the art of teaching more efficient and, that if we teach our students how to use it, we are preparing them for the future. Sure, we teachers can use A.I. to create our prompts and do our grading, then insist that students not use A.I. to do their work. Unfortunately, that demand is nearly impossible to enforce, especially as A.I. improves at the task of writing student essays. But there is a deeper problem. It is what we model—that is, what the students see us do— as much as what we say that teaches. If students see us relying on A.I. to do our work, it sends a strong message about what is allowable and desirable. We lose the moral authority to insist that they do their own work and expose their own authenticity when we are passing off our own deeply human tasks to computers.

While I understand the appeal of A.I. to businesses, where the efficiencies of A.I. can create greater profits, teaching isn’t about profits and learning is rarely about efficiency, particularly if the learning we are pushing for has a faith component. It’s not efficient to struggle through developing a personal theology, understanding great literature, or work through successive drafts of an essay, but it is in that inefficient struggle that actual learning occurs. It’s like bodybuilding; you must do the repetitive, time-consuming work to have the muscle. Taking a pill or pressing a button on a keyboard just isn’t the same as sweating in the gym or reading Moby Dick and struggling through its meaning.

For those of us in institutions of faith, the need to push students to engage in the rough edges of learning is even more important, as we are adding an additional layer of meaning to the material taught at every school. Faith, after all, is in part something that is felt rather than merely thought; machines just can’t go there with us, as churches are learning. Not long ago, I sat in a pew listening to a sermon that was particularly flat and vaporous, given by a very young Episcopal priest. After the third or fourth cliché, it came to me: I was listening to a product of A.I. I recognized the same soullessness that we see in student papers. When Jesus taught, those in the audience went away in joy or angry or baffled. The A.I. sermon threatens none of that.

As with preaching, the cost of A.I.’s replacing teaching and learning is profound, and not just to the individuals who never learn to read deeply and write authentically. What can be lost to our society is the ability to tell stories that reveal the nooks and crannies of lives where our humanity is inscribed. It is those stories that are at the center of our culture and identities, that make great art worthwhile, that mark a book or movie or television show as meaningful.

My father was an artist, and I loved to watch him paint a portrait (another function that A.I. can now replace) from a photo he clipped to the edge of his canvas. Often, he chose to paint outside, on an easel set up next to the garage or on a rock outside a cabin. He took great joy in watching the person he was painting appear and become real as his own t-shirt, jeans, face and arms became daubed with color. There was always a story in the finished work, something beyond the static image of a person. It was never purely representational, like a photograph; but he said that imperfections and what he added let it be “realer than real.” Truth is in that roughness, he taught me.

The following generations of my family are full of educators, and the frustration with A.I. is real and overwhelming when we gather. The near-effortless creation of an A.I. essay replaces everything a student is supposed to do in many courses: read a book, discern meaning, and write about it. Instructors at every level are now inundated with mediocre essays written by A.I. When students are caught doing this, they are sometimes confused by the condemnation they receive by instructors. They simply don’t understand why they are in trouble for not writing their own work. Having watched so many messages promoting A.I., the prospect of a computer accomplishing the task of writing an essay bearing their name doesn’t feel like cheating to them—rather, it is just the way things work, and exactly what they want to be trained to do.

Of course, it is not just faith and education that are at risk as computers take over our interpersonal relationships. A growing industry [i] provides lonely people with fake-friend chatbots that the user can program to be “agreeable,” “introverted” or “violent,” with some platforms reporting user engagement for over an hour every day. Perhaps more troubling still is the trend towards computers taking over things like denying medical insurance claims [ii], even as denials reach record highs.

All of it is driven by money. Tech companies are investing about $1 trillion—that’s $1,000,000,000,000—on A.I. according to Goldman Sachs [iii], and the marketing messages seeking to ensure that this investment yields sufficient returns are already inundating us. We are being told that A.I. is the future, but not much about what that future will look like for our families and towns and beautifully imperfect human relationships. Decades ago, Wal-Mart was the future of retail, which turned out to include hollowed-out downtowns lined with shuttered storefronts. Then smart phones were the future, and that included the end of eye contact at too many meals. Each new well-marketed development increases profits and efficiency but pulls apart our social fabric (including our connection to institutions of faith). A.I. forthrightly promises to be the biggest change of all.

Within education, the A.I. revolution threatens to extinguish those charged with preserving our human dignity: the storytellers. For Christians, the faith is centered on a remarkable storyteller; it’s not for nothing that Jesus taught through parables that remain relevant to us today, rather than simply laying out rules, arguments, and platitudes. The gift of imbuing a story with what is genuine, beautiful, true and awkward will be lost when we delegate that task to computers. Yes, facts will be conveyed, but so many fewer truths. Our challenge as educators should not be to help tech companies promote A.I.; it should be to teach students alternatives to A.I.—like writing your own damn essay.

Part of my work as a professor is leading a small clinic that prepares clemency petitions for people in prison. The work I do with my students in our clemency clinic is entirely consistent with both the Constitution (and its pardon clause) and the faith mission of my school, which is centered around a Savior who taught that when you visit those in prison, you visit him. In that sense, my students have a sacred task: they will tell a story that may be a key to literal freedom, or at least to a recognition of human dignity that people in prison rarely receive. My students must spend two days with our client in prison before they begin to write. The world knows one part of that imprisoned person’s life– the crime– and our job is to tell the rest of it. The stories they come back with are never simple or linear. The lines are crooked and broken and veer into deep vulnerability for both the imprisoned subject and the student storyteller. In that process of telling a story lies our deepest humanity, our connection to God and to neighbor, and it is there that A.I. imperils us most.

Mark Osler is a professor at The University of St. Thomas School of Law and is a frequent contributor to Christian Ethics Today.

https://substack.com/@markosler