The AI Mephistophilis

How pliant is this Mephistophilis,

Full of obedience and humility!

Such is the force of magic and my spells:

No, Faustus, thou art conjuror laureat,

That canst command great Mephistophilis - Christopher Marlowe, Dr Faustus

Last week's post was written in the frustration of marking student papers with genAI hallucinations. This week I spent talking to the students about why. Inevitably my mood is more sober, and my prevailing emotion is of sympathy or perhaps even pity.

The temptation... I can only imagine how hard it is to resist. Students take assignments home and submit digitally. They are told they can't use generative AI. I chose the question and I told them not to use generative AI. And yet, there it is, in their pockets, on their screens, on their laptops, just a click away. It can produce an answer to that question. The devices through which we access AI tools are designed to be addictive. Just about the whole interent is designed to be addictive. And, in a way, so are these new tools. All that power, to do weeks worth of work in a few seconds. What intoxicant, what opiate, can simply remove struggle; not numb you to it, but actually just do away with it?

Life happens. The paper doesn't get done. The student needs help. It's a click away. How long will a stressed-out uni student (already conditioned to tech addiction through childhood and adolescence) resist?

We've been fed a firehose of AI hype in media and social media. The tool can write anything, says the relentless messaging. It's the way of the future. It augments human capability. The possibilities are boundless. Everyone will use it.

For a student with an assignment ask it one little question - can you find me a reference for this? - or maybe two... and then three, feels like streamlining, not wrongdoing.

It's a trap.

To use generative AI - or at least to use it badly; to rely on it to do your thinking and communicating - is in some sense to admit defeat and consign yourself to irrelevance. It is an admission that your capability, your personality, even, is replaceable. What client (I want to scream at my students) would pay for a lawyer who offers nothing beyond what a free chatbot could?

The capability to think, work, reason, struggle - like strength, like flexibility, like memory, like any capability - atrophies without constant use.

Perhaps its impossible. But I still say, resist! Don't give over to generative AI the things that should be yours.

I don't mean never use these things. The good ones are better than search engines for finding useful information if used right. They are great for formulating and tinkering with thought expriments, hypotheticals, case studies. They are great for fixing formatting in text. They are great for planning a path to learn something new. They are great for many things I am sure I don't know about.

But the moment you outsource your thinking and expression to a product controlled by inconceivably large companies: that is the moment you acquiesce to your own subjugation. Don't let a company that doesn't give a shit about you think your thoughts for you with a pseudo-brain they still haven't finished making. Please.