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agonyaunt2024-10-21 11:19 am
minoanmiss) wrote in agonyaunt2024-10-21 11:19 am
Entry tags:
Care & Feeding: My son can't do this.
Full title: My Kid’s Teacher Has Assigned My Son a Project That Will No Doubt Turn Him Into an Incel
Dear Care and Feeding,
I’ve just been informed of an assignment my son “Patrick” was given in middle school. He’s to select a topic from a pre-approved list, ask ChatGPT to write an essay about it, submit that essay to the teacher, and then fact-check the essay, looking for things the AI got wrong. I do not want Patrick doing this assignment. ChatGPT is an irreducibly sexist device that reads and then regurgitates garbage that pushes impressionable young men into misogyny and inceldom. He is absolutely banned from using AI of any sort in our household, and if I can keep him from ever interacting with it until he’s 18, I consider it the least I can do for him as a parent. Only now the school is mandating he use it. Is there any way I can get the teacher to change his mind about this assignment? Surely it can’t be that hard to just produce a bad essay and have him fact-check that, right?
—Can’t We Just Protect the Kids from the Robots?
Care and Feeding is Slate’s parenting advice column. Have a question for Care and Feeding? Submit it here.
Dear Care and Feeding,
I’ve just been informed of an assignment my son “Patrick” was given in middle school. He’s to select a topic from a pre-approved list, ask ChatGPT to write an essay about it, submit that essay to the teacher, and then fact-check the essay, looking for things the AI got wrong. I do not want Patrick doing this assignment. ChatGPT is an irreducibly sexist device that reads and then regurgitates garbage that pushes impressionable young men into misogyny and inceldom. He is absolutely banned from using AI of any sort in our household, and if I can keep him from ever interacting with it until he’s 18, I consider it the least I can do for him as a parent. Only now the school is mandating he use it. Is there any way I can get the teacher to change his mind about this assignment? Surely it can’t be that hard to just produce a bad essay and have him fact-check that, right?
—Can’t We Just Protect the Kids from the Robots?
Dear Can’t We,
Advertisement
I grant you, AI is spooky. But it is here to stay. And for all its downsides (among them: being so easy to use for cheating, deception, and creating false narratives and “news” [absolutely not an inclusive list]), it is not responsible for creating incels. I promise you, there is no need to exaggerate AI’s potential harm.
Patrick’s teacher is smart—creating an opportunity for his students to see for themselves what a crappy job AI does at the thing kids are most likely to use it for is clever. Pretending it doesn’t exist, forbidding its use at home, and imagining that your son will never be tempted to use it to write a paper for him is not going to protect him, even if it makes you feel better. But an exercise in discovering its limitations will help to make him skeptical about it; it will make him smarter about it. That’s exactly what you want. And it’s not what your proposed substitute assignment will do.
Dear Care and Feeding,
I’ve just been informed of an assignment my son “Patrick” was given in middle school. He’s to select a topic from a pre-approved list, ask ChatGPT to write an essay about it, submit that essay to the teacher, and then fact-check the essay, looking for things the AI got wrong. I do not want Patrick doing this assignment. ChatGPT is an irreducibly sexist device that reads and then regurgitates garbage that pushes impressionable young men into misogyny and inceldom. He is absolutely banned from using AI of any sort in our household, and if I can keep him from ever interacting with it until he’s 18, I consider it the least I can do for him as a parent. Only now the school is mandating he use it. Is there any way I can get the teacher to change his mind about this assignment? Surely it can’t be that hard to just produce a bad essay and have him fact-check that, right?
—Can’t We Just Protect the Kids from the Robots?
Care and Feeding is Slate’s parenting advice column. Have a question for Care and Feeding? Submit it here.
Dear Care and Feeding,
I’ve just been informed of an assignment my son “Patrick” was given in middle school. He’s to select a topic from a pre-approved list, ask ChatGPT to write an essay about it, submit that essay to the teacher, and then fact-check the essay, looking for things the AI got wrong. I do not want Patrick doing this assignment. ChatGPT is an irreducibly sexist device that reads and then regurgitates garbage that pushes impressionable young men into misogyny and inceldom. He is absolutely banned from using AI of any sort in our household, and if I can keep him from ever interacting with it until he’s 18, I consider it the least I can do for him as a parent. Only now the school is mandating he use it. Is there any way I can get the teacher to change his mind about this assignment? Surely it can’t be that hard to just produce a bad essay and have him fact-check that, right?
—Can’t We Just Protect the Kids from the Robots?
Dear Can’t We,
Advertisement
I grant you, AI is spooky. But it is here to stay. And for all its downsides (among them: being so easy to use for cheating, deception, and creating false narratives and “news” [absolutely not an inclusive list]), it is not responsible for creating incels. I promise you, there is no need to exaggerate AI’s potential harm.
Patrick’s teacher is smart—creating an opportunity for his students to see for themselves what a crappy job AI does at the thing kids are most likely to use it for is clever. Pretending it doesn’t exist, forbidding its use at home, and imagining that your son will never be tempted to use it to write a paper for him is not going to protect him, even if it makes you feel better. But an exercise in discovering its limitations will help to make him skeptical about it; it will make him smarter about it. That’s exactly what you want. And it’s not what your proposed substitute assignment will do.
no subject
So what do you do? Expose them with guidance. Watch videos about online radicalization together (I strongly recommend The PewDiePipeline video, available on Youtube) so they know what to look for and how to recognize it happening in their friends. Discuss what incels believe and why it’s not actually true. Discuss misogyny and why what they propose is inaccurate, and the real reasons behind something when something they say looks accurate on the surface (like they’ll claim that family courts are biased against men because women get the kids way more often, but when you dig deeper, you find that in areas where women do get custody way more often, it’s generally that many dads don’t ask for custody because they don’t want it).
If your kid has no exposure, they don’t learn the skills of recognizing subtle bullshit or radicalization. They don’t learn the skill of investigating oppressive claims. They don’t learn how to protect themselves by knowing the reality first. LW, you’re advocating for the oppression equivalent of abstinence-only sex ed here, and that just doesn’t work. Give your kid the skills to have the info, and get the info in the future, that will allow them to recognize oppressive content and not be duped by it.