Artificial intelligence is all the rage these days. While there is good reason to doubt the truthfulness of the title, GenAI–generative artificial intelligence–public attention is deeper than the media, either the social or unsocial kind. In my world, writers, artists, teachers, content providers, and designers are in some degree of distress. The first wave of 2020s AI has gobbled up a googolplex of pages of original content and republished it without consent or credit in billions of images, essays, and answers to inane questions. And with plagiarism, there is always job displacement–and I would humbly suggest that as a class, free-range artists, writers, and academics are on rocky economic ground.

Some of this is not new. Our digital platforms have been shaping us in myriad ways for years. For example, autocorrect just corrected my “googolplex” and changed it to Googleplex.

However, teachers are facing the peculiar challenge of nearly untraceable plagiarism in the classroom. And the classroom is now a hybrid space, a digital chimera of the post-Information Age. I have caught a number of students using AI translators or writers to do portions of their work. In this situation, I observe that the classroom door is an almost magical device: it works both to invite students in for learning and to send them into the world, prepared or not. As it was snowing fiercely here in Prince Edward Island this morning, I suspect that some students will choose to engage meaningfully rather than be sent out with a Plagiarism Badge into a Canadian Winter of inflationary discontent.

With all of these factors in mind and seeing the potential of many emerging AI tools for research and teaching, our brilliant Inquiry Studies team at UPEI set to the task of redesigning the Autumn curriculum. We set the theme as “Smart Digital Engagement,” and rewrote our foundation-year course to shape students as inquirers who can develop a healthy relationship with AI, learn to choose the right tool for the right job, and discern the frenetic voices of social culture.

Autocorrect just changed my “phrenetic” to “frenetic.” Interesting.

Along with the thousands of teachers who are struggling to discern a good path in the jungle of AI implications, we are doing our best to figure out how to engage well.

As a science fiction nerd, though, I must admit that I find little of this “sudden technological leap” surprising. Nor are the implications new. Honestly, we have been reading and writing about the possibilities and implications of human-machine hybridity for generations. The loss of one’s humanity in one’s human activity is a theme that goes back to the ancients, including the Bible. Even culture-watchers who are not SF nerds should see the signs: In North America, we have bred functionalism into the DNA of our children; is it any surprise that when given the chance, students are apt to choose function over art, ethics, or identity? We left the path of wisdom some time ago when we decided that the heart of man was composed merely of walls, cavities, atriums, and valves.

Note that autocorrect did not correct my Latin there. It also has not been correcting my homonym errors, which are pro-fuse.

Beyond ethical and spiritual implications, there is the sheer question of technique. What tools will we have access to?

And it is here that I go from thinking, “I’m glad that everyone is suddenly interested in science fiction and philosophy,” to, “Come on, already! Why are the tools so slow in coming?”

Seriously, I want my own version of J.A.R.V.I.S.–before his incarnation, of course. The sarcastic butler voice is a bonus, provided my AI tools can effectively become my executive assistant, life coach, conversation partner, debate opponent, database manager, research assistant, and grammar-checker who, by all the gods of tin and wire, can actually learn from me as a writer.

I am desperate for all of this right now. But of course, I’m an avid reader of dystopia fiction. I won’t sell my soul until I know who the masters are. After all, I leave a socioecological footprint on this planet with my life, and that has now been twinned by my digital footprint. There are highwaymen waiting in ambush on the hedges of each identity road.

In preparation for our fall term, we were reflecting on how AI tools can be helpful. I have been playing with tablet apps, and so I decided to make a poster of my own need for digital enhancement tools. It is very much a “me” thing, and I thought it was worth sharing–not least because I have not done that much writing and sketching on paper since the 1900s. I am still working on my handwriting neatness, but the tablet is a digital tool that works for me in this age of screens that, like doors, work both ways.