The most frustrating thing about Alan Jacobs’s blog is the lack of a comments section. He posts so many thought-provoking things, and then gives me nowhere to put my provoked thoughts. So, here, in no particular order, are a handful of my reactions and comments to various things he’s posted over the past few months.
This post may explain why I just can’t bring myself to worry about ChatGPT in education. I just can’t summon the panic:
Imagine a culinary school that teaches its students how to use HelloFresh: “Sure, we could teach you how to cook from scratch the way we used to — how to shop for ingredients, how to combine them, how to prepare them, how to present them — but let’s be serious, resources like HelloFresh aren’t going away, so you just need to learn to use them properly.” The proper response from students would be: “Why should we pay you for that? We can do that on our own.”
If I decided to teach my students how to use ChatGPT appropriately, and one of them asked me why they should pay me for that, I don’t think I would have a good answer. But if they asked me why I insist that they not use ChatGPT in reading and writing for me, I do have a response: I want you to learn how to read carefully, to sift and consider what you’ve read, to formulate and then give structure your ideas, to discern whom to think with, and finally to present your thoughts in a clear and cogent way. And I want you to learn to do all these things because they make you more free — the arts we study are liberal, that is to say liberating, arts.
Alan Jacobs
The things that I want to teach students have nothing to do with ChatGPT or other “fake intelligences.” Like Josh Gibbs, I’m actually rather pleased that such tools are revealing the mechanistic nature of so many assignments.
Here Jacobs argues that “it is virtually impossible for good art to be made in our place, in our moment” because we—addicted as we are to the Panopticon—are victims of self-censorship, which is the enemy of artistic expression. This dovetails with two other posts: this one on cultivating a quiet “home base” away from the censorious crowds, and—to push back on the idea of the self-sufficient artist—this one on the importance of intellectuals (and, I would add, artists) always having “a living community before their eyes,” that is, a group of people to whom their thoughts and words are directed.
Here’s Jacobs doing what he does best: making fascinating connections between books. His description of The City and the City reminds me of Descent Into Hell by Charles Williams, though in the latter the cities overlap in time, not in space.
Christian Leithart 