How do I deal with AI in the classroom?
Every time my students use these technologies, they are training the beast and contributing to their own career demise.
As I prepare to return to teaching Sustainable Design to the School of Interior Design and other students from “The Creative School” at Toronto Metropolitan University, I have been struggling with how to deal with artificial intelligence or AI. Typically, I ask my students to do a book review, a presentation, and an exam. How do I know whether they are doing it or ChatGPT is?
I don’t think one can do a blanket “no AI” policy. I have been using Grammarly for years to correct spelling and punctuation, although of late, it has become far too aggressive in suggesting boring rewrites that don’t sound like me at all, and I ignore it. (Some universities are now banning Grammarly because it has gone way beyond grammar) I use Perplexity instead of Google for search, but I always click through to the links it provides to ensure it isn’t making things up. They are both useful tools.
I want to be positive. After all, the name on the door is “The Creative School.” I teach talented future interior designers, photographers, fashion designers, and journalists. If they use AI to produce better work but clearly demonstrate that they are the creative energy and thought behind it, should I not welcome this?
The University is of little help, saying, “Unless explicitly stated by the instructor, students should assume that using AI to complete assessments is prohibited.” But a hard no is unrealistic when even just doing a Google search has their stupid AI show up on top.
Writing in Inside Higher Ed, Jeremy Weissman has some suggestions for keeping AI out of the classroom:
Place a stronger focus on the classroom and human interactions. Relationship skills and constructive dialogue skills will likely be more important for the future of humanity than perhaps many of the skills students are learning today that will soon be automated away. I’d personally suggest also banning all technology in your classroom (except for justified exceptions) in order to facilitate a relationship-rich educational environment.
Incorporate or re-incorporate in-class assignments, both handwritten and possibly oral assignments.
This would be almost impossible in a class of 140 students with varying abilities to speak and write English, who are always looking at their phones, and who have terrible handwriting. I don’t know if they or I could cope.
Raise your hammers and smash the machines!
Or maybe I should be insisting that they get radical and fight the trend to AI. It is a power-sucking monster that is going to eat their jobs. It probably already is nibbling on them- why hire an interior designer when you can just upload a photo and have the AI do it? Why pay for a photo when you can use DALL-E and make your own image?
As Brian Merchant noted in his Blood in the Machine Substack,
“It’s clear now that generative AI is being used to undermine and eliminate creative jobs, that AI slop is enshittifying the internet, that a new regime of software automation—that next to no workers asked for—stands to profit power at workers’ expense.”
I am one of the thousands of laid-off writers who worked for the kind of websites that now publish a lot of AI slop. The interior designs shown on the PromeAI site are interior slop. A Bluesky buddy wrote this morning, “Enshittification is so 2024, enslopification is the theme for 2025,” and he’s right.
Slop is cheap and good enough for many people, so we probably will need fewer interior or fashion designers or photographers, definitely fewer journalists, and we will get paid a lot less.
Canadian futurist Chris Holland recently wrote a LinkedIn post discussing a 2021 tweet by Sam Altman about how AI will reduce the value of jobs done on computers compared to jobs that require physical activity. Holland writes:
“In reality, this means that soon your computer job will be worth less than working in the kitchen at McDonalds. Of course, the price paid for that job won't change at all, so we'll have people with 30 years of experience built off of 4-8 years of education living out of their cars, making minimum wage, while a good 30-40% of the population crawls into a ditch and dies due to being inconvenient.”
I wrote a bit about this in my book Living the 1.5 Degree Lifestyle, wondering why all these increases in productivity from computers, technology, and now artificial intelligence were not leading to a 15-hour work week and more leisure time and income for workers, as was predicted by John Maynard Keynes. Quote:
According to Benjamin Friedman, it’s because of inequality. Basically, all the gains from the increases in productivity went into the pockets of the rich. He quotes economist James Meade, writing in 1965, discussing how having more time would have the opposite effect:
Meade instead thought “wages would thus be depressed,” as ever less labor was necessary for production. Correspondingly, an ever greater share of total income would go to the owners of the machines. In the absence of government-provided welfare on a massive scale, therefore, most of the workforce would be compelled to take whatever low-paying jobs they could get, presumably in the service of the machine-owners but not working with the machines. In Meade’s vision, “we would be back in a super-world of an immiserized [impoverished] proletariat of butlers, footmen, kitchen maids, and other hangers-on.”
More about this in On Leisure, "positive idleness," and "negative idleness."
Toronto Metropolitan University was founded in 1948 as the Ryerson Institute of Technology “to address post-war demands for skilled tradespeople. The institute initially focused on training in skilled trades such as architecture, costume design, and photography.” These are all under threat.
In the course of writing this, I have come to the conclusion that my students should raise their hammers and smash the machines. They should reject AI tools that take their words and ideas to train the model, which then gets regurgitated as AI slop. They should, as Merchant puts it, “continue to refuse the technologies of exploitation.” They must realize that every time they use these technologies, they are contributing to their own career demise.
I would be very interested in hearing what others are doing and thinking about this. Leave a note in the comments. Also, I am reminded of a short video the Guardian put together almost a decade ago:
We were recently given a draft floor plan of a daycare to redesign and make in to a buildable facility. It was supposedly done using AI.
The plan had all the pieces there, washrooms and classrooms but it was a mess.
There's always a job for creativity.Just because it can generate a picture doesn't mean it will be a real building that can be built.
As a college student I can tell you that I write my papers without AI, however, when I turn them in, Turnitin the tool that professors use to detect antiplagiarism and AI generated papers I usually get at least 10-20% of "AI generated" content which I think is not right.