In which I am Ahab, and AI is guess who

 You would think that someone who has taught Moby-Dick would understand the dangers of becoming Ahab and giving in to monomania and hunting the white whale because "I'd strike the sun if it insulted me." 

I am really trying to learn this lesson. 

AI is not completely pervasive, as best I can judge, but the 3 or 4 students in each class who keep using it madden me: "He tasks me, he heaps me." It's like getting a bad student evaluation out of 25 good ones: you can't let it go. 

And I am alone in this quest: for in-class courses, in-class writing is the answer, but for asynchronous ones we're on our own.  

Neither the university's academic honesty policy nor its guidance are of any help. If students are using AI it is definitely our fault for failing to be understanding, or nice, or write AI-proof composition-style assignments asking for personal narratives about their childhoods or a local issue (guess what? determined AI-ers fabricate those, too). 

The official policy is to teach them how to use AI "responsibly" by rewriting it, and I'm stuck back in the 20th century trying to get them to read and think and analyze using their brains, so I'm the one out of step. 

Yes, AI detectors are unreliable (though some are better than others), but when you get a piece of writing about a complex novel 2 hours after it was assigned, and said writing does not sound like human writing (it's perfect and soulless), it's a little confirming so that I don't feel that I'm nuts for seeing it. 

Yet it gets to me. I know that academic dishonesty has now been handed over to instructors as a "you problem," but that doesn't mean it's easy to drop it. 

The rubrics take care of some of it, but not all. I hate having to call them in to talk to them about possible AI use, because I want them to be ethical and do the work because they want to and because I have killed countless hours trying to make it interesting and accessible. I want to think well of them. Before those meetings, I'm torn up about it and can't think of other work. 

So I try not to stew about it, and then I can't stop thinking about it, and then I spend inordinate amounts of time thinking about ways to get that white whale, and that way lies madness. 

Today when I sat down to grade, my eyes just plain shut (I am very tired). 

I don't know the answer, but I need to become Ishmael to find some balance. 

Two views of AI-assisted teaching (spoiler: I think I'm right and they're wrong)

When I teach online, I use tools that allow students to comment, some of which allow a longer response in a discussion board, and some of which allow line-by-line annotation of the kind you would get in hypothes.is. and assign an auto-grade. Let's call it hypothes.is for short. 

But based on the teaching philosophy I outlined in an earlier post--"I’m paying attention, and I hope that they are as well"--I have told them that I am reading everything they write in my class, and I am doing it, too. I turn off all the intrusive "AI can generate the instructor's responses for you" defaults lest they infect what's left of my brain. 

It is my (possibly touching and naive belief) that if you connect individually with students by responding to them, even if they are online, they will have a better experience and might be less likely to plop everything into ChatGPT or its numerous hellspawn siblings and give me AI instead of their thoughts. 

There are a few concessions to knowing that they might try AI. I've disabled copying and pasting, to "encourage" them to write their own stuff for two reasons. 

• First, if they use AI, they still have to type it out, and given how low-stakes this is, some of them might choose to do the work as the path of least resistance. I had a student inquire about not being able to copy and paste, and I said, "nope, not in this class."
• Some students in previous semesters have copied and pasted from another student's work, a bold move given that I comment and say things on the board like "that's what X said above" and privately "see me." If they don't think I'm reading responses, they might think I won't notice. I notice. 

The other day, I was talking to a colleague ("they" for anonymity) and mentioned that I had just spent a couple of hours responding to students in hypothes.is and writing individual comments. 

Colleague looked at me as if I had grown two heads. "Here's a tip. Don't you know that hypothes.is grades them? You don't have to read all those."

Me: "Yes, but I want to respond to the students."

Colleague: "I never read them! They talk to each other! I look at their questions and once in a while dip into the comments for fun. The grades post themselves."

Me: "I think it's important." 

Colleague just stares at me as if their opinion of my intelligence has just dropped by double digits. Clearly anyone who had any smarts at all, in their view, would stop paying attention to stuff like student comments.

My first thought was "IDGAF what you think."

My second thought was "Your poor students. No wonder they pile on the AI garbage and think no one is reading, because in some cases no one is."

Yes, all this time is time and brainpower I could spend writing. 

But doesn't someone have to pay attention?  

 

 

(Off-topic) Postwar hauntings: Dana Andrews and Don Draper

 Reposted from 2013 because this is Dana Andrews's birthday. The original post has a comment by Carl Rollyson, who wrote a great biography of Andrews. 

This is probably truly not of general interest to anyone except old movie buffs and Mad Men fans, so if you're neither, feel free to skip it.

If you think about a postwar character, a handsome, modern, alienated sort of man, one whose dark moodiness occasionally gives way to a smile that masks an inner sadness, you may think of Don Draper. As I was rewatching The Best Years of Our Lives a few weeks ago, it struck me that the actor Dana Andrews is the prototype for this character.  Like Don Draper, he's a creature of the time he's been born into yet always distanced from it. 

Andrews is probably best known as the detective in Otto Preminger's famous noir Laura, where he's a detective in the Raymond Chandler Lite mode--that is to say, cynical, hardboiled, with a few light wisecracks masking a serious attempt to get at the truth. This film defines the Andrews persona of the haunted man: here, what haunts him is a portrait, but elsewhere, there are other memories that haunt him. 

The part that Andrews pays in The Best Years of Our Lives is that of a returning war veteran whose high status as an officer disappears once he returns. The only job he can get is his old job, as a soda jerk, in a drugstore that's undergone a corporate takeover. He seemed to have everything--good looks, status, a bombshell of a wife (Virginia Mayo)--but now there's no place for him in this world. His skills as a bombardier are obsolete. Earlier, we've seen his PTSD, nightmares of a fire on a plane, a dream that he apologizes for. One of the movie's themes is that no one wants to remember the war, now that it's over, but that those who lived it can never forget. 

Near the end of the movie, Andrews  sits in the midst of an airplane graveyard, surrounded by the junked metal that a postwar world doesn't need.  He sits in the nose turret of one of the junked bombers, hearing the sounds of the bombing missions he made and realizing that he's also one of the nation's discards.

His reverie is broken by a voice from the future: the foreman of a construction crew that's turning wrecks into prefab housing. If he wants to live, he has to forsake the past, abandon his old identity, and start a new life. There's a happy ending of sorts for the film, but that haunted look is there to stay, along with the inner torment that inspired it.