Apologies, I haven’t posted for a while. I’m a slow writer and AI development is not. My latest post started to resemble an early attempt at scarf knitting as new ideas kept getting added. So rather than post my unwieldly article, I’ve started creating short (somewhat scrappy - I’m learning!) Instagram videos.
Here is the transcript of my first Reel:
Shamed for using AI
We seem to be living through some kind of intellectual prohibition at the moment.
All of us have (at minimum) dabbled with AI. Yet even though it’s everywhere, we’ve made AI use feel like a moral infraction for some - especially for those of us in education or the creative industries.
Ordinary people are being judged for doing quietly what tech leaders are doing openly and making fortunes from! Corporations and tech entrepreneurs are being accelerated and lionized whilst students are hauled up in front of misconduct boards… writers and artists, publicly shamed.
I understand why and that is not what this argument is about. My argument is that we must not let this moment become yet another mechanism for gatekeeping. It’s about placing our individual relationships with AI amongst the community where it belongs. We need to stop thinking in terms of bans and fears and start thinking in terms of stewardship and people-led guardrails.
If students are forming a new kind of linguistic self in dialogue with AI - and they are - they need space to reflect on that with others. If some of us are becoming dependent, forming attachments, or just seemingly utilizing AI successfully in our daily lives, we need space to reflect on that, with others.
Healthy relationships don’t form in hiding and if we keep pretending these interactions don’t exist, we risk creating a world where the most intimate parts of intellectual life are automated and isolated and where the only people who aren’t hiding their use of AI are the ones getting rich off it!
Happy to be shamed, doesn’t stop the learning growth