I am on a lively, fun group text chat with some of my classmates at Princeton Theological Seminary, which is not a sentence I ever thought I’d write and probably not one you ever thought you’d read. But life is a rich tapestry, and you never know, do you?
We share clips and memes and ask general questions — the kinds of things you find in group text chats everywhere — but sometimes we get into seminary-specific topics, such as complicated issues of Anglican theology, church doctrine, and particularly juicy heresies. The conversations about heresies, I’m sure you’re not surprised to hear, are the most fun.
In a recent thread, I used a Hebrew word and reproduced it in the chat using the Hebrew alphabet, including the vowels (which is a hard trick to accomplish). But that’s the thing about seminary nerds — we’re always showing off.
“Hey! How did you get those vowels in the Hebrew keyboard?” one of my classmates asked. “I’m trying to do that in one of my other chat groups.” (See what I mean about seminary nerds?)
What I did was this: I asked ChatGPT for a few translated words in Biblical Hebrew, and in about two seconds, they popped up on my screen. I chose the one I was thinking of and did the thing we all can do in our sleep: I selected the word, copied, went back to the chat group, pasted, and … easy. I also saved the entire ChatGPT exchange in a project file within the app, because the two words it translated and defined for me appear many times in the Hebrew Bible, and I know I’m going to want to use this research in a future essay or term paper.
“I feel weird about using AI for school stuff,” one of my classmates added to our text. “I think it hurts the education process.”
I didn’t know how, exactly, to respond to that and thought for a minute that I might ask ChatGPT for some advice, but after a few moments of inactivity in the chat, the AI-critical classmate added, “I mean, that’s just me, I’m sure it’s a useful tool in a lot of ways.” Seminarians are nerds, but as you can see, they are peacemaking nerds.
What followed, though, was an interesting discussion about the ethics of using AI in the classroom, the boundaries between “good” AI use and “fraudulent” AI use, and recent news reports about the rampant use of AI-generated writing by students. Teachers everywhere have noticed the rampant and indiscriminate use of ChatGPT and other AI tools in their students’ work.
“What happens,” a classmate asked, “when no one knows how to think anymore?”
Because I am by far the oldest person in the chat and have a reputation as an elderly grouch to maintain and burnish, I couldn’t resist responding, “What happens when? No one knows how to think now!”
It’s a bad habit of mine to remind young people, whenever they start complaining about the present or fretting about the future, that they have zero idea about how the world actually worked, or works, or will work. This is a deeply unattractive trait, I know, and I hated it when old people did it to me when I was young. But now that I’m old, I can see how irresistible it is.
So I reminded my younger classmates that we used to have things called “Blue Books” — thin, lined notebooks that were passed out during final exams, in which we were expected to (neatly) handwrite our essay answers directly from our own in-plugged brains. And then, the professors and teaching assistants actually read those essays and graded them for content, originality, and mastery of the material.
“That seems really hard for the teachers,” one classmate wrote.
THE CUSTOMER SERVICE TURING TEST
I agreed. But then added that when it comes to learning or teaching something, the hard way usually is the only way. And then I quoted Proverbs 14:23: “In all toil there is profit, but mere talk tends only to poverty,” to which I added the Hebrew (Masoretic text) including the vowels, because when you ask ChatGPT, “is there a proverb or saying in the Hebrew Bible about how doing things the hard way is usually better?” it gives you a pretty complete response.
And as long as that never appears on an exam, I’m home free.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer, including as a screenwriter and executive producer on Cheers, and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.