At the last wedding I went to, the groom’s godmother and the bride’s sister both used artificial intelligence to write their toasts. I know because—unlike my students, sheepish during our hushed conversations in the hallway—they freely admitted to it.
In the godmother’s defense, it was an impromptu toast at the rehearsal dinner. Someone had to say something, and she drew the short stick. “I only found out about this a few minutes ago,” she apologized, “so please bear with me.”
I was prepared to. Even as a high school English teacher, with a background in speech and debate, I still get nervous when I have to speak publicly. I grew up with my dad repeating the fact that it was people’s #1 fear, worse than death, which isn’t true but sounds like it could be. (The research points more sensibly to government corruption).
I also see my students struggle. In class the other day, one girl balked at the prospect of reading aloud just one paragraph of her beautiful writing. “Do I have to?” she asked, her voice shaking.
This student was saved by the bell, whereas the groom’s godmother stood before us with a champagne flute in her hand: “This isn’t really my thing, so I asked ChatGPT to write a poem about love.”
At which point she began to rhyme. At which point I more or less blacked out.
I can’t reproduce the poem here, but I can provide a representative stanza coughed up by Google Gemini, the generative AI tool that the School District of Philadelphia has made available to all teachers and high school students:
For love is not a trophy won
or something you can keep.
It’s a promise that you’re planting
for a future you will reap.
Friends, I experienced this moment as a spiritual death. Not my own, but humanity’s. Isaiah 59:2: “Your sins have separated you and God.” Or, to quote the captain of my school’s Ethics Bowl team on the subject of AI: “Humanity’s so cooked, bro.”
I was, of course, primed for this sin to sting. I’m an English teacher and, like the bride, a writer. Aline and I met in graduate school, where we spent three years arranging words like flowers in our poems, essays, and stories.
But still: AHHH !! ?? !!
My first instinct was accusatory. Why not type “wedding poem” into the search bar? Two top hits anthologize works by human poets whose human hearts pumped human blood such that they experienced the miraculous human emotion of love. Outsource the labor to them instead of the soulless algorithm! Personally, I have copied Margaret Atwood’s sober “Habitation” into more than one wedding card: “Marriage is not / a house or even a tent / it is before that, and colder.”1 Even better, speak from the heart. Offer a piece of hard-earned advice, tell a sweet story, say how you feel. It won’t matter if it’s pretty, as long as you mean it.
But I soon softened, and that’s the teacher in me. Does the godmother even know that poems like Atwood’s exist? I’m asking sincerely. What love poems had she been exposed to in school? Neither Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 130” nor Poe’s “Annabel Lee” is exactly fitting for the occasion, Aline’s hair unworthy of being called “black wires…on her head,”2 our AirBnb in Georgia quite far from any “kingdom by the sea.”3
Aline’s wedding sent me spiraling. I started to wonder: If we can’t stuff generative AI back in its box (let’s try!), how should what and why we teach shift in its wake?
At the beginning of every year, I start with a debate about the purpose of school. I project a series of provocative quotes, and students filter to the corner of the room corresponding to how much they agree with them. Malala Yousafzai’s words cast school as a necessary place of liberation, as do bell hooks’. On the other hand, an excerpt from Dead Prez’s “They School” damns an oppressive system that “ain’t teachin’ us nothin’ related to solvin’ our own problems.”4 A quote from Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comics likewise takes school to task for entirely missing the point:
I’ve been making a list of the things they don’t teach you at school. They don’t teach you how to love somebody. They don’t teach you how to be famous. They don’t teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. They don’t teach you how to walk away from someone you don’t love any longer. They don’t teach you how to know what’s going on in someone else’s mind. They don’t teach you what to say to someone who’s dying. They don’t teach you anything worth knowing.5
I used to teach in one of the poorest cities in Massachusetts, where students connected with these critiques of school. I now teach at the top-ranked public school in Pennsylvania, where, unsurprisingly, they are quicker to defend an institution that has largely served them well.
Even as someone so fond of school he’s collected graduate degrees like Pokémon cards, I know it must be transformed, top to bottom. Dead Prez rightly calls for schools to be laboratories of true political and economic freedom, whereas Sandman insists that, even absent oppression, we can’t forget to tend to students holistically. I’ve always been moved by the latter’s lament, its hyperbole of “anything worth knowing” that rings true. It feels different now. Will people start to feel that, in fact, there’s no need to know what to say to someone we love or someone who’s dying now that we can ask the algorithm to speak for us?
Regardless, maybe “spiritual death” was dramatic. Maybe it’s spiritual debt I’m worried about.
I’m borrowing this language from the MIT Media Lab, which published preliminary data about the cognitive debt that accumulates from using ChatGPT as an assistant in essay writing. Anecdotally, I can corroborate that this shortcut cheats young brains out of basic, necessary critical thinking skills. Last week, a student who takes dual-enrollment courses at Penn told me a particularly chilling story. When the professor asks a question, she said, her classmates toggle between social media or online shopping tabs in order to type the question into ChatGPT and regurgitate its answer.
I repeat: AHHH !! ?? !!
But I’m not worried, here, about our brains. I’m worried about our spirits. I don’t think it’s dramatic to say that generative AI threatens to bankrupt the student-teacher relationship. It’s so easy, so tempting, to cheat that my students are understandably cheating more. Soon, it won’t even feel like cheating. In the meantime, I feel like a cop, constantly hunting for proof in their version histories. Which I hate. But not half as much as I hate the default skepticism I’ve started to develop of a student’s elegant sentence or sharp insight, i.e., exactly what I’m trying to teach. I want to trust them. I want to trust what we’re trying to accomplish together.
Students aren’t the only ones in the red. My seventh graders frequently flame a teacher of theirs who uses AI to create tests, grade work, and reply to emails. Plenty are following suit, and good on students for raising the alarm, especially in schools where there’s a double standard. Reluctantly, I admit I have found time-saving uses of Gemini, such as generating multiple-choice questions to help students prepare for high-stakes standardized tests, but they mostly fire me up to knock those tests off their pedestal, to fight in our unions for sustainable workloads, class sizes, and caseloads such that we’re not desperate, all the time, to cut corners.
But this shitstorm implicates more than the student-teacher (increasingly robot-robot) relationship. What happens when we cheat our hearts out of an opportunity to speak to all the people we love?
Consider Spike Jonze’s 2014 sci-fi film Her. Not because the main character falls in love with his AI—a phenomenon already getting disproportionate coverage—but because his day job is ghostwriting love letters and condolence cards. Shouldn’t we find our own words, the film asks, to say “I love you” or “I’m sorry for your loss”?
If you think that ship has sailed, our present already narrated by the platitudes of Hallmark cards, I’m sympathetic. But I fear an AI-dominated future will be worse, our hearts atrophied, our mealymouths reciting the empty words of robots in our toasts and eulogies, at our retirement parties and baby showers. Of the many, many reasons to resist AI—calamitous energy waste, intellectual property theft, and labor exploitation—let’s not forget that the more we use it, the less human we’ll become.
Nor should educators forget that, as we continue to resist AI, we can prioritize humanity in our classrooms right now. We can commit to a pedagogy of the spirit.
For that, I look to Toni Morrison’s 1993 Nobel Lecture, one of the most brilliant anything ever. You gotta read it start to finish—to meet the old woman, blind and wise, and the boys she punishes after they try to trick her, only to arrive later at Morrison’s revelatory twist, which forces you to reconsider a) whose side you’re on and b) the dizzying power of narrative—but I’ll tease just a bit from the end, when the boys really put the screws on the old woman:
Is there no context for our lives? No song, no literature, no poem full of vitamins, no history connected to experience that you can pass along to help us start strong? You are an adult. The old one, the wise one. Stop thinking about saving your face. Think of our lives and tell us your particularized world. Make up a story. Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created. We will not blame you if your reach exceeds your grasp; if love so ignites your words they go down in flames and nothing is left but their scald.6
Oh, AI could never!
I think about these boys all the time, begging for art so meaningful it will transform their lives. Short of poets, who better than English teachers to prescribe poems “full of vitamins”? To read with young people so that they grow healthy, live well, and have a poem on hand for any occasion—or at least know where to look for one?
We should take inspiration from The Paris Review’s former PoetryRx column—in which Kaveh Akbar, Sarah Kay, and Claire Schwartz matched poems with readers’ emotional needs—and try out similar activities in our classrooms, introducing students to the shiver and therapy of poetry. The Academy of American Poets’ Dear Poet project does similar work, inviting students to wrestle with some of today’s best poems and then correspond with the poets themselves. I’m also heartened by Linda Christensen’s recent article about how she used Pádraig Ó Tuama’s podcast Poetry Unbound as a mentor text to help students bust out of five-paragraph essays bogged down by sentence stems in order to analyze, from the heart, poems and songs they loved.
Have I drilled color-coded thesis statements into my students? Have I beaten senseless no small number of poems, short stories, essays, speeches in my classroom, turning over metaphors like stones as if the bugs of meaning will fly out and delight us all? You bet I have. Tests and evaluations demand it.
But we can do better. Too much is on the line.
We should carve out class time for authentic tasks that equip students with enough skill and courage that, when the time comes for them to make a toast, or write their vows, they will feel no need to resort to AI. In my last school, for example, we required all seniors in CP English to write graduation speeches as part of a gradewide contest. We shared Morrison’s advice: “Think of our lives and tell us your particularized world.” Students extricated universal lessons from personal stories. Then after they drafted, revised, and delivered their speeches, each class voted on a winner, and finalists presented again in front of administrators, who decided on the grade’s at-large speaker. I derived a quiet pleasure from the fact that their vivid, moving, vulnerable speeches always outshone the valedictorians’, invariably AP Lit students who, having missed out on the unit, hewed to cliché.
As with speaking, so with writing. In my classroom, we exchange book letters every two weeks, a practice I stole from independent reading experts like Penny Kittle. The personal openings have become my favorite part: the photos, the existential questions, the stories of friend break-ups and promposals. I try to model vulnerability; when I’m feeling down, I say so. I try to model a life of meaningful writing: a Galentine’s Day postcard I collaborate on with a bestie; an anniversary poem I write for my boyfriend. I cherish this yearlong conversation. Many students do too, some musing for pages and pages that ultimately serve as diaries for their year. We conclude with farewell letters, which nearly always make me cry and which I print out to save in a binder. Is this final letter the most important assignment of the year, one that’s not even graded? The art of saying goodbye; the art of saying thank you.
We could invite students to write their own anniversary poems or group-chat odes. It’s hard to say something original about love, but easier if you tell a story—once, knowing I was cold, you put the kettle on for me—and lean into that specificity. The kettle whistled. Ginger tea; a lemon on its last leg. It’s hard to say something original about friendship, but easier if you make a list of concrete details about that friendship and what it means. How you make the rice and I make the popcorn, heavy on nutritional yeast. How you say “totally” and I say “totally” till all the cows moo “totally.”
It’s easier—to write, I mean; to live, I mean—when the point is not a score but your spirit.
Back in Georgia, as we buttered our cornbread in Athens’ twinkly botanic garden, basking in the glow of a heartfelt wedding ceremony, Aline’s sister took the stage, visibly nervous. “It’s pretty intimidating to toast a published writer!” she joked, before telling us she’d consulted ChatGPT.
The words that followed were formulaic and insincere. I fidgeted in my seat. I averted my eyes. I felt sad for Aline, who deserved better from her lifelong best friend.
Aware that she was bombing, her sister finally, mercifully, exhaled and went off-script. Talked about how hard it was, as the older sister, to see Aline move away and build a life from scratch, without her.
“But I am so proud of you,” she said, really meaning it. “I am so happy for you.”
Her voice cracked and I was crying.
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Notes
- Margaret Atwood, “Habitation,” Academy of American Poets, https://poets.org/poem/habitation. ↩︎
- William Shakespeare, “Sonnet 130: My Mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun,” Poetry Foundation. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45108/sonnet-130-my-mistress-eyes-are-nothing-like-the-sun. ↩︎
- Edgar Allen Poe, “Annabell Lee,” Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44885/annabel-lee. ↩︎
- Dead Prez, “They Schools (Lyrics Video),” uploaded by PoliticalMuzikTV, August 28, 2013, YouTube video, 4:04 – 07. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8IUbVQRqAk ↩︎
- Neil Gaiman, The Sandman (Burbank: DC Comics, n.d.), n.p. ↩︎
- Toni Morrison, “Nobel Prize Lecture,” NobelPrize.org, December 7, 1993. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1993/morrison/lecture/ ↩︎