Marc Watkins is right; my flavor of AI skepticism

A “Paying Attention to AI” Substack post…

The other day, I read Marc Watkin’s excellent Substack post “AI Is Unavoidable, Not Inevitable,” and I would strongly encourage you to take a moment to do the same. Watkins begins by noting that he is “seeing a greater siloing among folks who situate themselves in camps adopting or refusing AI.” What follows is not exactly a direct response to these refusing folks, but it’s pretty close and I find myself agreeing with Watkins entirely. As he says, “To make my position clear about the current AI in education discourse I want to highlight several things under an umbrella of ‘it’s very complicated.'”

Like I said, you really should read the whole thing. But I will share this long quote that is so on point:

Many of us have wanted to take a path of actively resisting generative AI’s influence on our teaching and our students. The reasons for doing so are legion—environmental, energy, economic, privacy, and loss of skills, but the one that continually pops up is not wanting to participate in something many of us fundamentally find unethical and repulsive. These arguments are valid and make us feel like we have agency—that we can take an active stance on the changing landscape of our world. Such arguments also harken back to the liberal tradition of resisting oppression, protesting what we believe to be unjust, and taking radical action as a response.

But I do not believe we can resist something we don’t fully understand. Reading articles about generative AI or trying ChatGPT a few times isn’t enough to gauge GenAI’s impact on our existing skills. Nor is it enough to rethink student assessments or revise curriculum to try and keep pace with an ever-changing suite of features.

To meaningfully practice resistance of AI or any technology requires engagement. As I’ve written previously, engaging AI doesn’t mean adopting it. Refusing a technology is a radical action and we should consider what that path genuinely looks like when the technology you despise is already intertwined with the technology you use each day in our very digital, very online world.

Exactly. Teachers of all sorts, but especially those of us who are also researchers and scholars, need to engage with AI well enough to know what we are either embracing or refusing. Only refusing is at best willful ignorance.

AI is difficult to compare to previous technologies (as Watkins says, AI defies analogies), but I do think the emergence of AI now is kind of like the emergence of computers and the internet as tools for writing a couple of decades ago. A pre-internet teacher could still refuse that technology by insisting students take notes by hand, hand in handwritten papers, and take proctored timed exams completed on paper forms. When I started at EMU in 1998, I still had a few very senior colleagues who taught like this, who never touched their ancient office computers, who refused to use email, etc. But try as they might, that pre-internet teacher who required their students to hand in handwritten papers did not make computers and the internet disappear from the world.

It’s not quite the same now with AI as it was with the internet back then because I don’t think we are at the point where we can assume “everyone” routinely uses AI tools all the time. This is why I for one am quite happy that most universities have not rolled out institutional policies on AI use in teaching and scholarship– it’s still too early for that. I’ve been experimenting with incorporating AI into my teaching for all kinds of different reasons, but I understand and respect the choices of my colleagues to not allow their students to use AI. The problem though is refusing AI does not make it disappear out of the students’ lives outside of the class– or even within that class. After all, if someone uses AI as a tool effectively– not to just crudely cheat, but to help learn the subject or as a tool to help with the writing– there is no way for that AI forbidding professor to tell.

Again, engaging with AI (or any other technology) does not mean embracing, using, or otherwise “liking” AI (or any other technology). I spent the better part of the 2010s studying and publishing about MOOCs, and among many other things, I learned that there are some things MOOCs can do well and some things they cannot. But I never thought of my blogging and scholarship as endorsing MOOCs, certainly not as a valid replacement for in-person or “traditional” online courses.

I think that’s the point Watkins is trying to make, and for me, that’s what academics do: we’re skeptics, especially of things based on wild and largely unsubstantiated claims. As Watkins writes, “… what better way to sell a product than to convince people it can lead to both your salvation and your utter destruction? The utopia/ dystopia narratives are just two sides of a single fabulist coin we all carry around with us in our pockets about AI.”

This is perhaps a bad transition, but thinking about this reminded me of Benjamin Riley’s Substack post back in December, “Who and What comprise AI Skepticism?” This is one of those “read it if you want to get into the weeds” sorts of posts, but the very short version: Casey Newton, who is a well-known technology journalist, wrote about how he thought there are only two camps of AI Skepticism: AI is real and dangerous, and AI is fake and sucks. Well, A LOT of prominent AI experts and writers disputed Newton’s argument, including Riley. What Riley does in his post is describe/create his own taxonomy of nine different categories of AI Skepticism, including one category he calls the “Sociocultural Commentator Critics– ‘the neo-Luddite wing,'” which would include AI refusers.

Go and check it out to see the whole list, but I would describe my skepticism as being most like the “AI in Education Skeptics” and the “Technical AI Skeptics” categories, along with a touch of “Skeptics of AI Art and Literature” category. Riley says AI in Education Skeptics are “wary of yet another ed-tech phenomena that over-hypes and under-delivers on its promises.” I think we all felt the same warriness of ed-tech and over-hype with MOOCs.

Riley’s Technical AI Skeptics are science-types, but what I identify with is exploring and exposing AI’s limitations. AI failures are at least as interesting to me as AI successes, and it makes me question all of these claims about AI passing various tests or whatever. AI can do no wrong in controlled experiments much in the same way that self-driving cars do just fine on a closed course in clear weather. But just like that car doesn’t do so great driving itself through a construction zone or a snowstorm, AI isn’t nearly as capable outside of the lab.

And I say a touch of the Skeptics in AI Art and Literature because while I don’t have a problem with people using AI to make art or to write things, I do think that “there is something essential to being human, to being alive, that we express through art and writing.” Actually, this is one of my sources of “cautious optimism” about AI: since it isn’t that good at doing the kind of human things we teach directly and indirectly in the humanities, maybe there’s a future in these disciplines after all.

I’ll add two other reasons why I’m skeptical about how AI. First, I wonder about the business model. While this is not exactly my area of expertise, I keep reading pieces by people who do know what they’re talking about raising the same questions about where the “return on investment” is going to come from. The emergence of DeepSeek is less about its technical capabilities and more about further disrupting the business plans.

Second, I am skeptical about how disruptive AI is going to be in education. It’s fun and easy to talk with AI chatbots, and they can be helpful for some parts of the writing process, especially when it comes to brainstorming, feedback on a draft, proofreading, and so forth. There might be some promise that today’s AI will enable useful computer-assisted instruction tools that go beyond “drill and kill” applications from the 1980s. And assuming AI continues to develop and mature into a truly general-purpose technology (like electricity, automobiles, the internet, etc.), of course, it will change how everything works, including education. But besides the fact that I don’t think AI is going to ever be good enough to replace the presence of humans in the loop, I don’t think anyone is comfortable with an AI replacing a human teacher (or, for that matter, human physicians, airline pilots, lawyers, etc.).

If there is going to be an ROI opportunity from the trillion dollars these companies have sunk into this stuff, it ain’t going to come from students using AI for school work or from people noodling around with it for fun. The real potential with AI is in research, businesses, and industries that work with enormous data sets and in handling complex but routine tasks: coding, logistics, marketing, finance, research into the discovery of new proteins or novel building materials, and anything involving making predictions based on a large database.

Of course, the fun (and scary and daunting!) part of researching AI and predicting its future is everyone is probably mostly wrong, but some of us might have a chance of being right.

January 21, 2025

A New Substack About My AI Research: “Paying Attention to AI”

As I wrote about earlier in December, I am “Back to Blogging Again” after experimenting with shifting everything to Substack. I switched back to blogging because I still get a lot more traffic on this site than on Substack, and because my blogging habits are too eclectic and random to be what I think of as a Newsletter. I realize this isn’t true for lots of Substackers, but to me, a Newsletter should be about a more specific “topic” than a blog, and it should be published on a more regular schedule.

So that’s my goal with “Paying Attention to AI.” We’ll see how it works out. Because I still want to post those Substack things here– because this is a platform I control, unlike any of the other ones owned by tech oligarchs or whatever, and because while I do like Substack, there is still the “Nazi problem” they are trying to work out. Besides, while Substack could be bought out and turned into a dumpster fire (lookin’ at you, X), no one is going to buy stevendkrause.com, and that’s even if I was selling.

Anyway, here’s the first post on that new Substack space.

Welcome to (working title) Paying Attention to AI

More Notes on Late 20th Century Composition, CAI, Word Processing, the Internet, and AI

My goal for this Substack site/newsletter/etc. is to write (mostly to myself) about what will probably be the last big research/scholarly project of my academic career, but I still don’t have a good title. I’m currently thinking “Paying Attention to AI,” a reference to Cynthia Selfe’s “Technology and Literacy: A Story about the Perils of Not Paying Attention,” which was her chair’s address at the 1997 Conference for College Composition and Communication before it was republished in the journal for the CCCs in 1999 and also expanded into the book Technology and Literacy in the Twenty-First Century.

But I also thought something mentioning AI, Composition, and “More Notes” would be good. That’s a reference to “A Note on Composition and Artificial Intelligence,” a brief 1983 article by Hugh Burns in the first newsletter issue of what would become the journal Computers and Composition. AI meant something quite different in the late 1970s/early 1980s, of course. Burns was writing then about how research in natural language processing and AI could help improve Computer Assisted Instruction (CAI) programs, which were then seen as one of the primary uses of computer technology in the teaching of writing— along with the new and increasingly popular word processing programs that run on these newly emerging personal computers.

Maybe I’ll figure out a way to combine the two into one title…

This project is based on a proposal that’s been accepted for the 2025 CCCCs in Baltimore, and also a proposal I have submitted at EMU for a research leave or a sabbatical for the 2025-26 school year. ¹ I’m interested in looking back at the (relatively) recent history of the beginnings of the widespread use of “computers” (CAI, personal computers, word processors and spell/grammar checkers, local area networks, and the beginnings of “the internet”).

Burns’ and Selfe’s articles make nice bookends for this era for me because between the late 1970s until about the mid 1990s, there were hundreds of presentations and articles in major publications in writing studies and English about the role of personal computers and (later) the internet and the teaching of writing. Burns was enthusiastic about the potential of AI research and writing instruction, calling for teachers to use emerging CAI and other tools. It was still largely a theory though since in 1983, fewer 8% of households had one personal computer. By the time Selfe was speaking and then writing 13 or so years later, over 36% of households had at least one computer, and the internet and “World Wide Web” was rapidly taking its place as a general purpose technology altering the ways we do nearly everything, including how we teach and practice writing.

These are also good bookends for my own history as a student, a teacher, and a scholar, not mention as a writer who dabbled a lot with computers for a long time. I first wrote with computers in the early 1980s while in high school. I started college in 1984 with a typewriter and I got a Macintosh 512KE by about 1986. I was introduced to the idea of teaching writing in a lab of terminals— not PCs— connected to a mainframe unix computer when I started my MFA program at Virginia Commonwealth University in fiction writing in 1988. (I never taught in that lab, fwiw). In the mid-90s and while in my PhD program at Bowling Green State University, the internet and “the web” came along, first as text (remember Gopher? Lynx?) and then as GUI interfaces like Netscape. By the time Selfe was urging the English teachers attending the CCCCs attendees to, well, pay attention to technology, I had starte my first tenure-track job.

A lot of the things I read about AI right now (mostly on social media and MSM, but also in more scholarly work) dhas a tinge of the exuberant enthusiasm and/or the moral panic about the encroachment of computer technology back then, and that interests me a great deal. But at the same time, this is a different moment in lots of small and large ways. For one thing, while CAI applications never really caught on for teaching writing (at least beyond middle school), AI shows some real promise in making similar tutoring tools actually work. Of course, there were also a lot of other technologies and tools way back when that had their moments but then faded away. Remember MOOs/MUDs? Listservs? Blogs? And more recently, MOOCs?

So we’ll see where this goes.

¹ FWIW: in an effort to make it kinda/sorta fit the conference theme, this presentation is awkwardly titled ““Echoes of the Past: Considering Current Artificial Intelligence Writing Pedagogies with Insights from the Era of Computer-Aided Instruction.” This will almost certainly be the last time I attend the CCCCs, my field’s annual flagship conference, because, as I am sure I will write about eventually, I think it has become a shit show. And whether or not this project continues much past the April 2025 conference will depend heavily on the research release time from EMU. Fingers crossed on that.

December 9, 2024

Back to Blogging Again

And with changes coming to my Substack experiments

Back in August, I announced to my vast audience of all things stevendkrause that I was going to shift my blogging practices to a Substack site. Now I’m shifting back— sort of.

There are two reasons for this.

First, while I have begun to find an audience on Substack, I still get more readers on the old blog– or at least I get a lot of hits, according to the Jetpack stats. I am assuming that the reason for this is people stumble across 20+ years of content via Google searches and the like. The most popular post I’ve had on the site for the last couple of years, “AI Can Save Writing by Killing ‘The College Essay,'” had 68 hits since August, and after I said I was done here. Most of my Substack posts have had fewer views. Altogether, stevendkrause.com had around 1700 hits since August; that’s not a lot, but it is more than I received since August on Substack.

Second, and this is probably a more important reason for returning to the old blog, Substack isn’t a blogging platform. Rather, it is a newsletter platform with some interesting social media features (a place for updates ala Facebook or X or Bluesky, chat features, podcast features, etc.). My friend and colleague Collin Brooke commented on my post announcing my shift to Substack that one of the reasons why he likes Substack emailed newsletters is he has them all going to a particular folder or something so he’s able to follow them “like an old school RSS reader.” That makes some sense from a reader’s perspective– and note to self, now that I’m nearly done with the semester, that’s something I ought to set up for my Substack subscriptions instead of just letting them clog up my inbox.

But I’m also interested in Substack as a way of growing my audience, and as far as I can tell, the most successful Substack newsletters are published regularly– some daily, some weekly, some less than that– and they are about a specific topic. My blogging habits have always been much more random than that both in terms of how often I post and what I post about.

So here’s my plan– for now:

I’m going to post stuff here more or less whenever I can get to it/when I feel like it. For the last couple of years, I usually post a couple of times a month. Then I’ll repost/republish those posts on Substack as an “all things Krause” newsletter available in subscribers’ email and at stevendkrause.substack.com, probably around once a month.

Eventually, maybe when I have some time over the break, maybe next summer (but honestly maybe never too), I’d like to get a little more systematic, specific, and newsletter-like on Substack. For example, I am thinking about starting a Substack newsletter about why it is a terrible idea for educators to resist/refuse/ignore AI, and about how “paying attention” to AI is not the same thing as embracing it. I’m also thinking I might create another Substack newsletter to post regularly about food things, which would be about my interests in cooking and I guess I’d say the “food biz.” That might also include more about Zepbound, which is kind of the opposite of being interested in food.

Like I said, we’ll see.