“To characterize what I do as ‘making’ is either to mistake the methods—the research, the editorials, the workshops, the courses—for the purpose or, worse, to describe what I do as ‘making’ other people, diminishing their own agency and role in sensemaking, as if their learning is something I impose on them.”
Debbie Chachra, “Beyond Making,” in Making Things and Drawing Boundaries: Experiments in the Digital Humanities (2017), chap. 36.
I found this passage interesting since it shows the distinction between the tools and the reason for using those tools made by Chachra. Here, Chachra is referring to education, although, as far as I am concerned, the same principle could apply to several technologies that we use nowadays. On one hand, the tool enables us to achieve something, however, the end result might not be the most significant part.
This made me automatically think of generative AI. I have witnessed how handy it is to have access to an AI that can easily generate text, summaries, and responses in a matter of seconds. At the same time, I have utilized AI as an aid that allows people to arrange their thoughts and grasp topics better. While such a solution can be quite helpful, the problem is that it becomes difficult to distinguish the moment when a person uses a tool for his/her thinking and the moment when the tool thinks for the person. The other reading for today makes this problem even more evident since it addresses the issue of how AI-generated writing defies the original purpose of an undergraduate essay. If AI can easily generate a readable essay with a simple prompt, then the value of the essay should not be in the result alone. It should also lie in the process.
This is one of the topics within the field of Digital Humanities which I am hoping to explore during this academic year. It is about how technology such as artificial intelligence (AI) is influencing the way we conduct research, writing, and learning in general. More specifically, it would involve me working on generating content using AI and then compare them to works produced by humans. The topic will not be limited to asking whether or not AI is good or bad for education; but rather about finding out what are its strengths and weaknesses and how does it affect the way we generate information.