Not a Bot

April 20, 2023

One day in the spring of grade 12, my English teacher, in one of those last-ditch efforts that passionate teachers make to cram in life advice before their students graduate, launched into an impromptu lecture about cheating. "Cheating is giving away your brain," he said. We all just stared back at him, so he amplified: "Learning is for you, not for some teacher or degree. When you substitute someone's thinking for yours, you're sacrificing the most important asset you have. Never give away your brain. If you need to fail, fail proudly. Just make sure you're you while you do it."

"Never give away your brain" has echoed behind me through the decades. I discovered that Mr. Marcus's words apply in circumstances way beyond school: at the doctor's office, for example, or when choosing friends...and, for me, in writing this weekly column. Next week is the 22nd anniversary of the launch of KidsOutAndAbout.com. And each week since April of 2001, I've wrestled with ideas, doing my best to say something that this newsletter's (now) 750,000 subscribers will find meaningful, in 400 words or less. It takes lots of time.

As you can imagine, given my profession and social media algorithms, I am frequently served ads urging me to cede my writing to artificial intelligence. This AI copywriting tool will do it 10x faster, without sacrificing on quality, one ad claims, with no awareness of irony (real writers would know the bot could augment the quality of that sentence by sacrificing the unnecessary word "on"). I'm sure that even in his most cautionary mood, Mr. Marcus never imagined the day when people would have to question whether what they were reading was written by an actual human.

As AI becomes more ubiquitous, the temptation to cut corners will increase, and Mr. Marcus's words will have even greater significance. "Who will it hurt?" students will reason as they use a chat bot to write the Brave New World paper that is due the next day for 12th grade English class. The answer is, of course, THEMSELVES. But the bots won't tell them that. So we have to.

Yep. This parenting gig just got even more complicated.

—Deb