On C2C： Will AI be the end of critical thinking？
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Summary
In this episode, we're joined by cognitive scientist and lecturer at Dalhousie University and contributor to C2C Journal, Christopher Snook, to talk about the dangers of artificial intelligence (AI) in the real world.
Transcript
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I have not been as fearful of artificial intelligence as some people have, because I don't think
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that human intelligence has often served as well, but that's a bit of a glib joke to start
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off what is a serious discussion, which is what AI is doing to discourse and to thought.
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Now, we haven't talked a lot about AI on this show.
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I've kind of been waiting for the right angle and the right opportunity, and I should say
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I've been one of these people that has sort of enjoyed the novelty of it.
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When ChatGPT has come up and you get the ability to just have a quick conversation with this
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thing and have it give you some response to a question, and there's a program that I've
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had some fun with called MidJourney, which will create AI-generated images, and you can
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The one that I did, I won't show you because I wasn't thrilled with it, but I asked for
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like childhood photos of Fidel Castro pushing young Justin Trudeau on a swing, but the AI
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was getting Fidel Castro and Justin Trudeau's faces mixed up, which maybe makes it smarter
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And then I also had some fun this morning, and I asked to get like some photographs of
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Krista Freeland driving, so maybe we can throw those up.
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I thought that speed demon, Krista Freeland, fresh off the heels of getting her ticket
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That's her basically road racing down some Alberta highway.
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I like the one on the bottom right myself, although it looks a little terrifying.
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You can see in the back right there, it looks to be a center block that she's just like leaving
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She's really flying there so much that she needs the space helmet.
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She's putting on so many miles and going so fast, she has ascended off the ground.
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But for all the fun that AI offers, and yes, there is some, it also has very serious implications.
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And those implications we have not really fully explored because despite the fact that this
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technology has been in development for many, many years, it really seems it's only been
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in the last year that people have started to grapple with the real world implications
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And, you know, we see this in academia where universities which have had to focus on detecting
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plagiarism now have this new problem, which is did students just create something original
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by entering a few prompts for their essay assignments into chat GPT or whatnot.
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There's a great piece in C2C Journal by Christopher Snook about this called AI,
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The Destruction of Thought and the End of the Humanities.
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He is a lecturer with Dalhousie University and a contributor to C2C Journal.
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And he joins us now, not an AI-generated version, but the man himself.
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So let's start first off with where your issue is with this.
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Why are you concerned about AI in the context here?
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Yeah, I can, I suppose I can answer that in a fairly simple way.
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As you've already indicated, there's a great deal of joy maybe to be had with playing with
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But at the simplest level, I suppose maybe I could say two things.
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One would be that AI introduces, I'm a humanities teacher, so AI-generated content introduces
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into the university and into students' lives very easy possibilities of escaping from a certain
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kind of reflection that may be essential to their development within the context of the
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But secondly, I think I have a pretty significant concern that AI is actually indicative in many
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respects of a much longer trend in humanities education in Canada that has fairly uncritically
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assimilated new technological developments without reflecting on their consequences for pedagogy
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And, you know, one thing that I always recall, even from my own time in university, is that
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I would do better at them now, but they were very challenging because you can't really cheat
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your way through an essay unless you're actually cheating and plagiarizing and whatnot,
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You can't Google the answer to the question when you basically have to show your work
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And certainly in an academic context, AI has huge implications for that, because all of
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a sudden someone else could do the thinking with you.
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I could just give this machine a bunch of different data points and say, formulate an argument
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And that's something, I mean, I've talked to professors who have already been complaining
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about the decline in critical thinking in universities.
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And now we've added this other tool, which maybe can be used for good, but also can further
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erode people having to come up with these skills on their own.
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What I've tried to do in the article, maybe if I kind of talk about some of the points
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in the article, that may be helpful for at least giving people a sense of where my concern
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So my concern really grew out of two things that I saw in the university last year.
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So the first was, I mean, a remarkable amount of energy and anxiety around the appearance
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Sort of large language models that can produce texts fairly competently, increasingly competently
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for students with very, very little to no work on their side.
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So there's a huge amount of anxiety, as you pointed to, Andrew, earlier in your introduction
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It's a different, it's not even plagiarism in any recognizable sense.
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So it's just allowing AI to generate texts from the information it's kind of gathered
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through its internet, through its chat box on the internet.
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So there was a huge conversation about this in the university.
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And what I noted was that primarily that conversation was focused on questions of use.
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And so I spend some time teaching engineers, though I teach humanities to engineers, and they
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I was going to say, that seems like a very, that seems like a very difficult challenge for
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It's a hard sell, it's a hard sell, but they're very patient.
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And they tolerate this sort of required course on, effectively on the history of technologies.
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And one of the key things that I've been thinking about since teaching this course is
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what Neil Postman simply observes, which is that the introduction of every new technology
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But he sort of coined the idea, or helped kind of articulate the idea that every technology
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shifts the world ecologically in much the same way that an ecosystem is changed if a new
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So it's not just that we have all of a sudden AI, but rather that the whole world shifts
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around the availability of these new technologies.
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And embedded in these technologies are certain assumptions about what it is to be human.
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And so it's a bit of a rambling response to your previous comment.
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But what I noticed in the university over the last six or seven months is that the conversation
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There have been some people who are sort of diametrically opposed to the appearance of
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I kind of tend in that direction, certainly for the humanities.
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Others who are much more supportive of the use of AI in various ways to facilitate writing.
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But regardless of where one stood on, it stands on the use of AI, I've noticed that very few
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people are asking deeper questions, such as what kind of world does AI produce and what
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kind of worldview or what sort of assumptions are built into the technology?
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And it's there that I think universities need to really be careful about the implementation
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of AI, partly because I think AI actually reveals, it's a bit apocalyptic, that is, it kind of
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reveals something about the nature of higher education in Canada that's been developing
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And we could talk about that sort of narrowing a viewpoint diversity to different aspects
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But also, I think the other thing that I think has been missed is that AI, AI generated texts
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pushes against certain proclaimed positions, moral positions that the university has adopted
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One aspect that this springs to mind, and you address it in the piece, in one section anyway,
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And, you know, facts, in theory, are neutral, and they do not have a political persuasion.
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It's the assembly of facts and the composition of various facts that you can use to sort of
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demonstrate something that is a bit more biased.
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And one thing we've seen in AI is how it's providing, it's doing the thinking for you in theory.
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But the problem with that, among others, is that it is producing a biased outcome.
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I mean, I had once, when I was first playing around with ChatGPT, a debate with a machine.
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So the joke was on me about what a woman is.
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And it was interesting seeing this machine twist itself into all of these many logical
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But it was actually quite terrifying how it started giving me the talking points I would
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expect if I were having this with some university diversity administrator.
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And it started telling me about inclusivity and tolerance and women can come in any forms.
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And there is something there in which AI is basically telling people that there is one
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way to construct a thought when it does this, that you aren't actually able to assemble facts
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And certainly the studies have varied and in some cases disagree a little bit with one
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another about where the biases are found in AI technologies.
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Though some people have, there's been some studies that have tried to argue that there's,
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because some of the early scraping of the internet focused primarily on Reddit sites,
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that there was a kind of conservative or male bias somehow in the technology.
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But it seems to me fairly clear now that the technology seems to be biased fairly clearly,
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I think, in the other direction in terms of the kinds of sources that it's recycling when
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So I began the article and this is one of the things, maybe a way of thinking about AI in a
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broader context or sort of moving back from the technology to think about what it has to
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I began the article in C2C really just by reflecting on the fact that
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a kind of formulaic response to the work of pedagogy has become characteristic of universities
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And it's in part indicated through the demand that applicants for university positions
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complete diversity, equity, and inclusion statements, diversity statements as part
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And kind of famously, or if you follow these sort of stories infamously, depends on what
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one thinks about all these things, a professor in the United States asked ChatGPT to produce
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And he was astounded to see, just as you've described, the speed with which ChatGPT was
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able to reproduce all of the talking points and all of the assumptions of a fairly kind of
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middle-of-the-road Canadian higher education position on issues of diversity, inclusion,
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To my mind, what that revealed was that we're sort of beginning to operate in the university
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in a world that is fairly, at the very least, formulaic in its expectations of whatever diversity,
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inclusion, and equity may be about, or diversity, equity, and inclusion.
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So it was from there, really, in the article that I wanted to try to see or to explore how
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is it that the technologies that are available to us now in the university and that have been
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slowly growing in their implementation in the university over the last 15 or 20 years
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may actually be both accelerated by the advent of AI, but may also be, in a certain sense,
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pointing towards AI, that is to say, pointing towards a world in which a kind of formulaic
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regurgitation of information becomes a kind of normative expectation of students, even
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So just to sort of maybe make a connection with what you found when you poked and prodded
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ChatGPT, that it tends to kind of produce fairly predictable results relative to certain
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Well, there is also to this, I mean, the most, I guess, cogent defense I hear of AI is that
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AI is little more than a mirror to the existing world.
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I mean, AI is not really formulating its own materials that it's not drawing from the trove
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Now, obviously, individual inputs can be manipulated, and we also have terms of use that govern it.
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I'm trying to bring us away from the use discussion of this that you were talking about earlier,
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but I guess in that sense, is this just reflecting an existing problem, or is this making it worse?
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I would say from, there might be two things to say about that.
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On the one hand, from my perspective, and this was maybe my concern with the conversation so far
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in higher education in Canada about AI, its preoccupation with questions of use has really prevented
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people from asking a much slower and more difficult question, which is to say, is this actually a
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benefit, or is it simply a reflection of the world we're in, or is it making things worse?
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So I think that that deeper question about the kind of ecosystem consequences or cultural
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So that is to say, AI at some level is a kind of metaphor, in much the same way one might think
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about COVID as a kind of, we can think about it as an illness, but we can also think about
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COVID response, at least, as a bit of a metaphor of our contemporary cultural moment.
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But I would say from the perspective of pedagogy, AI raises some very deep questions that, to
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my mind, intensify problems that were already present.
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So it's not so much that it simply introduces a newness that's radical, but intensifies certain
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So one of those problems, I think, is connected to the use of devices generally for humanities
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So one of the things I think many of us have experienced is the extent to which screens and
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screen reading and iPhones or cell phones, the extent to which they actually produce in us
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kind of habits of scanning, a kind of hyper-attention, what one scholar calls forms of hyper-attention,
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not focused attention or contemplative reflection, but a kind of hyper-attention that actually
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tends to kind of lead us towards a certain kind of rashness in our decision-making.
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So that's one deep and profound concern I have, especially when institutions seem to be dominated
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by certain sets of political commitments that ought themselves to be subject to serious
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So if we're in an environment where there's certain assumptions about what political positions
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are normative, it needs to be the case that those can be thought about deeply and reflectively.
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And if we're using technologies that limit that capacity, then we're in a little bit of
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But the other one, I think for me, from the perspective as a teacher, is that, and this
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would be, I mean, I'm affiliated with the classics department and I spend a lot of time in the last
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years teaching Augustine, a sort of famous foundational voice for the Western world.
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And Augustine is one of many thinkers who highlights the fundamental role of memory in the
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constitution of our personalities, the sort of crucial role that memory plays.
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And it's kind of essential to technologies like Chachi BT that we offload or offshore the
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faculty of memory to the technological device, right?
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So I don't struggle with Augustine or Dante or Homer or any of those things.
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I let Chachi BT do the struggle in a certain sense.
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I mean, it's not really struggling, but I let it do the amalgamation of opinion making,
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information, and I'm left passive in that response.
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So in that sense, I think the technologies actually inhibit the kind of interior dialogue
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that's fundamental to education, but that's also fundamental to being a free person in the
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Hannah Arendt, I think, points this up very, very powerfully in her reflections on totalitarianism.
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If we can't have a dialogue with ourselves, if we're pulled out of ourselves endlessly
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and offshore, even our memory, we lose the ability to actually be free agents in the world.
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So these are some of the things that I'm very concerned about at the level of pedagogy,
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which is why I tend to a pretty puritanical, I suppose, relationship to AI when it comes to
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I recognize AI has different applications in different contexts.
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It's funny, at the risk of oversimplifying it, I think of, you know, a movie that I've
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I could find out what happens in that movie in about 60 seconds by just reading a plot
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I watch the movie because there is something in that process.
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You feel, you see, you learn, you get insights.
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It's the same as why, you know, despite the fact that I may not have taken this advice when
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I was in high school, reading the Coles notes of something is not the same as reading the
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I mean, I could get chat GPT to say, you know, give me some bullet points that I can bring
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up in tutorial about, you know, the cave or something.
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And I also wonder, I mean, to appeal to your department, the classics, if you were to input
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into chat GPT, the most beautiful works of literature of classics that you'd ever seen
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and said, create something like this, could it do that in your view?
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Could it create the beauty that we have seen from all of these people thousands of years
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That's a very hotly debated topic, as you may know.
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Of course, in the world of visual arts, someone recently was awarded a prize, right,
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in the visual arts for an artificially created, produced image, all kinds of, of course, very
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deep ethical questions around AI and its accumulation of information and how that happens.
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But, you know, from my perspective, for me, the answer to that question was really given
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Nick Cave, the Australian singer-songwriter, was asked this question.
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A fan sent him a poem that ChatGPT had written when he asked ChatGPT, write me a poem or a
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And Nick Cave's response was to say that even if it were a good song, which Nick Cave refused
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to concede that it was a good imitation, he said that the problem is that ChatGPT, artificial
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intelligence, has been nowhere and suffered nothing.
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And to be human in the world at all, as someone like Jordan Peterson is constantly reminding
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us, is to suffer and out of that suffering either to sort of produce meaning in the world
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And I've been fairly persuaded by Nick Cave that no matter how close the approximation one
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might be able to artificially reproduce, the fact that the technology has itself been nowhere
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and suffered nothing means that that material can have very little consequence for me as
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someone who lives in the world with all of its fragility.
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So, yeah, so I guess that would be my answer, which isn't, I mean, yeah, maybe not the best
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And now I'm like geeking out on this topic myself.
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So I think we'll have to have you back on in another show.
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But, you know, I remember when I did tutorials in various classes in university, the one thing
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that was always so critical when you were understanding a work was to understand the author and the
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And even if the author is some professor who's still alive, understanding how that professor
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came about, you know, you read, for example, a, you know, a dissertation and you say, oh, well,
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And with ChatGPT, that context is eroded because there is no human context or it's an amalgamation
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of, you know, 150 human contexts that you don't actually know about and can't see.
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So I think that's a less elegant way of describing what you've shared from Nick Cave there.
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The piece in C2C Journal is AI, the Destruction of Thought and the End of the Humanities by Christopher
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And they also have another part of this series written by Gleb Lysik, who we had on the show
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a couple of weeks ago about something else entirely.
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Good to talk to a real human in this day and age.
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Thanks for listening to The Andrew Lawton Show.
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Support the program by donating to True North at www.tnc.news.