One of the many ways in which our world will change as a result of generative AI will be the way in which students engage with school. Even in the last few years, things have changed regarding engagement. The pandemic brought about extremely lax policies with phones, for example. I’ve seen it in middle/high school classrooms when I coach teachers, and it’s very hard (or annoying) to enforce policies around phone use when no one else is, and having your phone out in school (and sometimes your earbuds) is just a ubiquitous part of student life.

When it comes to creativity, we can either assess the person creating or the creation itself. It might make more sense to judge the creation when the creator does not need formative feedback in the same way that a student would. I probably won’t critique Thom Yorke if I don’t like a Radiohead album. There’s not much utility in that. But I will critique the album, so others can know whether or not to avoid it.

When I was nineteen, I invited some of my friends from high school over. Soon enough, we began talking politics. We were, after all, newly minted college students. Only recently did any of us really read a newspaper. At the time (over 20 years ago), gay marriage was still illegal. We were all discussing it until one friend said “but none of us are gay. Why are we even talking about this?

I’ve always been interested (and somewhat put off) by the viral trend (mostly on short form content networks) of people doing things like cooking, getting ready, etc and spouting their views about all sorts of things that aren’t very interesting or profound. Why do we watch this garbage? I think the truth is: we want to simulate social connection. We often have talks with people while playing video games, getting ready to go out, cooking, etc.

In this first phase of the generative AI revolution, we’re all learning how to use it. Even those that call themselves experts are just poking around, figuring out what works and what doesn’t. Eventually, we’ll get past this phase. The majority of us will know the basis of how to interact with a model like GPT or Claude, etc. What does life look like then? We’re so fascinated right now that we aren’t thinking about the impact.