Intelligence Cannot Be Outsourced

Has artificial intelligence (AI) reached a tipping point? The evidence is mounting. Microsoft’s investing $10 billion in OpenAI, maker of the conversational language tool ChatGPT. After about two months of unlimited free use, OpenAI is starting a subscription service for the chatbot. Google unveiled a rival, Bard, on February 6. Already ChatGPT has drafted school essays, passed medical and law exams, and written legislation. Educators are concerned.

As I see it, intelligence cannot be outsourced to a bot nor does AI tackle the heart of our societal challenge: literacy. Many people of all ages say they don’t really read. A ProPublica article paints a disturbing picture of the scope of illiteracy in America and the limitations for adults who lack basic literacy: “A Fifth of American Adults Struggle to Read. Why Are We Failing to Teach Them?”

When you view it through different kinds of American communities, the picture grows more alarming. Even in affluent communities many lack basic reading skills. The chart below should concern all of us. 

No doubt we should work to make information accessible to people with different learning styles, but we all need to figure out how develop and sustain critical thinking and reading skills throughout life. Our collective future depends on it.

For this, I like one philosophy professor’s approach to the new tool, as he writes in “Why I’m not worried about my students using ChatGPT.” University of Wisconsin-Madison Professor Lawrence Shapiro suggests guiding students to critique essays the tool generates. He outlines the benefits of this lesson: “First, analytical writing, like any skill, benefits from seeing examples of what works and what does not. While students might reasonably object to having their own essays made a target of public inspection, chatbots couldn’t possibly care. Second, given that chatbots are not going to fade away, my students might as well learn how to refine their products for whatever uses the future holds.”