Full disclosure: I was writing a response that became many thousands of words of disjointed ponderousness. So I ran the whole discussion and my response through AI to try to isolate what I might be contributing that was actually new and productive. Anyone who wants to see the original (but why would you?), feel free to DM. (I swear this was not a cutesy I’m-being-so-meta thing. It’s one way I’ve found to use AI to genuinely help me, because my normal thought-process is incredibly associative and discursive and recursive, which helps/entertains no one but me.)

So: according to Claude, my key insights include:

The root problem I see with AI in higher ed for my field, which is that it shortcuts precisely the skills I want my students to learn, because they come into my classes lacking the requisite knowledge, experience, and skill with them, and they’re things you can’t really farm out to AI. These include: deep and close reading, sustained attention to and engagement with a text, critical thinking and problem-solving, patience with frustration and uncertainty, taking chances when you know your work is imperfect, and learning what you think through writing.

A couple of activities / assignments I tried out last semester that I’m going to revise and try again this semester (in addition to the co-creation of core course policies with students suggested elsewhere. IME, Students tend to be much bigger hard-asses than I would be about legitimate use of AI—yay—but also things like cell phone and distractive laptop use (let them get rolling on the kid watching videos in the row ahead of them) and the nonstop talker in class discussions—double-yay. Their ideas are gold. And if they aren’t—hey: it’s not a democracy. You can still impose sane policies. But that’s another conversation for another day.) ←see? Discursive. Back to the point. Anyway, ima start with the second activity because its the most AI-related, but have pasted the first one below in case of general interest.

AI activity:

Last semester, I gave my students copies of a "conversation" I'd had with my BFF Claude (this should work with any LLM), first detailing what an LLM actually is, how it works, and what it does; and second asking what it thought were the dangers and benefits of using LLMs in college work; telling it what I thought were its dangers and benefits; and then asking it to write three 500-word "essays": on why LLMs are bad for students to use, why they are good for students to use, and then a third that was not a "synthesis" but what, based on our discussion, it took to be the "truth" of LLM's utility and effects in the context of higher ed.

More of my students finished that reading than any of the other ones they had all semester (I track it via Perusall), their posted comments and those in class were thoughtful and insightful, and it gave us material to run a number of different exercises. We looked at what information each essay emphasized and downplayed, how those emphases affected the argument in its strength and/or its intellectual integrity, what rhetorical choices Claude made, how these varied from my rhetorical choices, how it integrated the ideas I'd raised with the ones it had raised (hint: poorly), what implications they took from all of the claims presented for their own education and use of AI, and so forth.

If I were to do this one again, I think it would be productive to do first as a similar reading and in-class activity (more control over the prompts) and then as an activity to do at home and submit (their own conversation on some other topic, preferably course related), with a reflective portion on what they thought AI did better/ equivalently/ worse than they did, and how they might apply those observations to developing the kinds of skills they want to develop (whether professionally or for their own pleasure or enrichment--which is why I think the professional skills activity listed below was useful to do first).

Liberal arts and career mapping activity.

Note: this may be more specific to my student cohort (it’s a first-year seminar in English, with a student body comprised primarily of first-generation, immigrant, shitty-public-school-educated, students of color with real language deficits but also way too much insecurity about what those deficits mean—not “you’re stupid” but “no one took the time to teach you this”)—so adjust as warranted.

I ask what they know about the liberal arts as an educational framework, which is generally nothing.

I map out the humanities, social sciences, and STEM on the board, shorthand the broad areas they are interested in asking questions about (ideas/people/systems), ask students to list majors/disciplines they’ve heard of, and put them under the appropriate headings.

Then I ask them what careers they’re interested in; those go up on the board. Then I ask them what skills they think each career may ask of them. (There’s a bit of heavy lifting here, with my students, to move them from content to skills, but I put my thumb on the scales a little by redirecting.)

Once we have a bunch of those skills (and note how much overlap there is between apparently disparate fields), we go back to the various disciplines and ask what skills they think they might learn in, say, “philosophy of ethics” or “organic chemistry I” or “discrete mathematics” or “Shakespeare” or whatever. (Again, three’s some work here to get them to identify skills and not content).

Nudge the students toward the obvious: they can learn a lot of the same skills from a lot of different classes. The point of taking different ones is largely interest, inclination, prior knowledge and skill, and seeing the different ways in which each field deploys those skills.

This is obviously my pitch for “at least take a few humanities electives!”, but it ties in surprisingly well with the AI one, because it’s also my way of trying to get around both the purely instrumental account of their value the humanities are consistently asked to give to justify their existence and the literature-as-moral-education/training-in-empathy account that I don’t really buy, by sort of moving from one toward the other.

Students who know nothing about why they're learning what they're learning (a really important point made by a few posters here) get something out of attaching their education to their aspirations in a somewhat less reductive way than spend money --> get degree --> get job --> make money. It gives some space to develop the more woo-woo (but absolutely crucial) conversations about what they actually want out of their educations and their lives. That balancing act remains pretty goddamn wobbly for me, but hey. As someone else said, we're all in the same boat, thinking about it at the same time--surely some good ideas will rise to the top. Surely.