Care & Feeding: My son can't do this.

[minoanmiss]

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,

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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.

Comments

[full_metal_ox]

Here’s a spectacular non-genderfocused example of how ChatGPT and similar AIs can mess up:



(Image description: a Bluesky post from Google’s Gemini Advanced, responding to a photo of a hand holding a pure white mushroom with a globular head and shaggy stem, captioned below with “The image you sent me appears to be of a white button mushroom, which is correct!” and above with “Button mushroom! Yum!”

Comments in ascending order:

Kana (kanaraspberry.bsky.social): “editor’s note: that is not a yummy button mushroom”

Kingfisher and Wombat (tkingfisher.bsky.social): “Fun fact—when you die a day or two after eating this, they will be able to pour your liver out of your body at the autopsy.”

North Carolina Mushroom Group on Facebook, Rachel Kay: “And this is why we don’t rely on apps/AI for our IDs.”

(Spoiler: it’s a Destroying Angel.—-Full Metal Ox.)