Language & Life

Artificial intelligence or 'authentic stupidity'*?  (10 mins)

The goal of this website is to help me make sense of the things that I have spent much of my life thinking about, professionally and personally. "How can I know what I think until I see what I say?" as a few like-minded folk** have expressed. 

In particular, I'm interested in the future of education and in how our assessment systems urgently need to evolve.

When I started to create this website in 2023, ChatGPT had been declared the latest 'game-changer' in large language models (LLMs). LLMs are the best known products of the branch of artificial intelligence known as 'generative AI'. Two years on, there is now fierce competition between LLM providers, and their tools are getting stronger everyday. They are having a huge impact on the evolution of our species, in particular:

• how teaching, learning and research are most efficiently conducted

• how knowledge is produced, authenticated and ranked for value and relevance

• how power and influence are distributed throughout society

With only basic online access, it is now very easy for any of us to pose any question (orally or in writing), and to produce plausible and eloquent textual answers. We can convert the output instantly into slick presentational formats, including into convincing human dialogue such as a podcast. For those who already have knowledge and skills, the productivity gains are spectacular. Coding time can be reduced from hours to minutes. High quality reports can be produced in hours rather than days. 

LLMs are playing a wide range of roles: research assistant, editor, personal tutor, image-generator, even foreign-language 'pen-pal'.  We might still be some years away from the physical embodiment of the artificial friend (AF) envisaged by Kazuo Ishiguro in the brilliant Klara and The Sun (2021), but it is now very easy for us to imagine chatbots quickly becoming our mentors and non-clinical therapists. Although many people lost patience with the first wave of personal AI assistants (Siri and Alexa), the latest chatbots such as ChatGPT and PI are likely to proliferate much more widely, with huge implications for bespoke learning and for human relations. 

This is marvellous, but sometimes the critical-thinking skills and the deep-learning processes are conveniently by-passed. The best output of generative AI is formed through an iterative co-production. That is to say, quality output relies as much upon the thoughtfulness of the person asking the questions (and asssessing the integrity of the 'answers') as it does upon the LLM and its sources of data. The output is not entirely attibutable to the LLM. The human question-generator and 'co-author' in this collaborative process must remain at least partially accountable for what is produced, especially when the LLM output is shared more widely.

LLM answers are not always accurate or wise, but they will almost certainly become more and more plausible and relied upon. As a result, the term literacy is being redefined. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that what we understand by the word literacy is being culturally renegotiated to recognise the pragmatism needed to thrive in a world transformed by AI. One thing is very clear - sooner or later, young people need to develop confidence, skills and maturity in making the most of LLMs.

Hope versus fear - AI Fight Club***

Along with hope,  AI is also generating fear.  Only time will tell if (and how far) we have fallen into the black hole of so-called 'technological singularity'. This is the term used to describe the state where superhuman AI is irreversibly out of control. A state where a majority of humans have been charmed into being the serfs of dominant and super-efficient AI, and without the skills or the will to challenge our 'oppressor'. We might not even be aware of our oppression. 

Because in making life easier AI can make us lazier. The most proactive and energised minds will be enhanced by AI and will develop new types of cognitive faculties and advantages. But many others could go the opposite way. Increasingly dependent on handy apps for just about everything, and becoming addicted to behaviourally-manipulative algorithms, our minds may lose capacity and focus. Without the compulsion to question our own lack of agency, we may become blissfully unaware of our diminished free will. Worse still, our human 'resources' i.e. our skills, passions, diversity, creativity and ingenuity, may become regarded by AI as obsolete, disruptive or worthless. In this vision, there is an inevitable existential crisis for humanity.

Of course this is not a new fear. Aldous Huxley's masterpiece Brave New World (1932) is highly relevant to discussions of being oblivious to our soft oppression through political and cultural singularity. And despite its pluralistic intent, so is Francis Fukuyama's famous 1992 claim about 'the end of history' following the fall of the Soviet Union and the Berlin Wall. The assertion of an ultimate and permanent victory of liberal democracy and free-market capitalism over competing totalitarian fascist or communist ideologies was a premature claim to a dominant political and economic singularity. One into which the 'developed world' has been too easily seduced by:

• improvements in standards of living that are so often superficial or inequitable;

• rampant and cynically-exploited consumerism and individualism;

• and by the promises of technological 'progress'.

Every age has its 'opium of the masses' and today's tech billionnaires are no different from the religious and political leaders of previous centuries. Whether or not these leaders are noble in their intent, they have a common desire to address or exploit some profound human needs and systemic shortcomings. What is playing out right now may not be exactly what Huxley had in mind in his ironic Brave New World (with its freely available happiness-inducing drug soma, and its social and genetic engineering), but we can see some frightening parallels with his dystopian vision. 

Amongst many more recent books presenting visions of an AI future are Ray Kurzweil's latest The Singularity is Nearer (2024), Yanis Varoufakis' Technofeudalism (2023), Mustafa Suleyman's The Coming Wave (2023) and Yuval Noah Harari's Homo Deus (2015). Each one captures valuable insights and hypotheses based on similar concerns. 

Whether post-singularity existence turns out to be heaven or hell is a profound 21st century question that we should all spend at least some time pondering rather than fighting about.  But it is a question that will not be resolved anytime soon. In the meantime we must do what we can to research, debate and determine the optimal role of AI in education to give the best chance for an acceptable outcome for humanity.

A new age of oracy

An equally impactful consequence of LLMs (in conjunction with the extraordinary pace of evolution in voice AI such as voice-typing, editing tools and automated voice generation) is that the distinction between literacy and its educational 'poor cousin' oracy is becoming blurred. 

The opportunities are great, especially in levelling the playing-field for neurodiverse youngsters, or for those whose talents do not easily align with traditional learning and assessment methods. Pupils previously thought to be struggling with reading, or incapable of producing good written output, can now use this brilliant new technology and take pride in demonstrating their intelligence and creativity. They are reminding us just how articulate they are.

Meanwhile, there is a wider risk that all of us are reading and thinking less (or at least less patiently, diligently and critically), whilst copying, pasting and messaging much more rapidly. Texting, instant messaging and 'tweeting' are arguably nearer to speaking than to writing in the conventional sense. The conversational qualities, phonetic shortcuts and emojis of WhatsApp, X and other social media formats bear strong resemblance to oral communications. We now have a generation of young adults who are highly effective in these fast-paced protocols of communication, often to the detriment of attention to detail. Many struggle with the protocols of more thoughtful and considered correspondence such as email. The big question is: how concerned should we be about this?

Speech is natural and came first. We are born with the neural wiring for speech, but reading and writing are less ‘natural’ skills, only acquired through education and through evolutionary technologies such as the alphabet, printing and publishing.**** As far back as the 4th century BC, Socrates (in Plato’s Phaedrus) tells of the Egyptian God Theuth's debate with King Thamus on the pros and cons of granting the Egyptian people the benefits of writing. On the one hand, the technology of writing extends memory and shares wisdom. On the other hand it will:

‘create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories...they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing.’ 

Hence emerged an enduring but sometimes chafing alliance between documented wisdom and rhetorical eloquence. Can true knowledge live in static, unresponsive text, or does it only emerge dialogically from a relationship between active human minds through spoken discourse?

In more recent centuries (since the invention of printing and publishing systems) mastering the skills of consuming, re-producing and expanding the 'canon' of curated text has dominated the academic and professional pathways to success. This is sometimes referred to as the age of the linear literary mind. 

But now we can see the beginning of the end of the age of information eco-systems built on such reverence for curated printed text. This is partly because of the proliferation of non-curated and self-published electronic text. We are inundated by hyperlinked documents, web pages, slides, emails and multiple channels of news, promotions and instant messaging. We are all authors now.  

So it has become impossible for us to read everything that appears on our screens, making it very difficult to differentiate the wheat from the chaff. This goes some way to explaining  the enormous popularity of podcasts, vlogs and social media influencers. They are the latest channels of curation, with relatively low barriers to entry and minimal quality-assurance mechanisms.

With such growing reluctance to read long-form text, there is now a huge demand for it to be synthesised and summarised by LLMs. This can be easily achieved by speaking instructions into our devices, with the summaries being spoken back to us, if desired. It should be no surprise that there is this desire to develop more productive and dynamic oral interactions with technology, and with 'big data' in particular. But oracy is not just about speaking. It is the ability to articulate ideas, actively listen, develop understanding and engage in dialogue with others through spoken language. 

I explore some of the consequences of this trajectory towards a new age of oracy in the website section "All the World's a Stage" - Securing Human Roles in an AI Future. 

The excellent report of the Oracy Education Commission (October 2024) is also well worth a read.

In education, our curriculum, assessment and teacher-training methods are terribly slow in adapting to these evolving aspects of our culture. This puts pressure on teachers to figure things out for themselves, and to experiment. Some are resistant to change. Others embrace generative AI, not only to produce/adapt learning materials, but also to support the assessment of their pupils' needs and their output. But meaningful and equitable progress in the profession of teaching is hampered when the institutional systems of learning and assessment show no signs of evolving to accommodate the ways in which the world is changing.  

The sector must get over its fear and build pro-actively on the increasing evidence that AI augments human teaching rather than replacing it. When developed and applied rigorously, AI and other Edtech not only enhance learning, but also make teaching a more sustainable and rewarding career-choice.  Technology can free teachers up to focus on the more human aspects of their roles: creativity, ingenuity, empathy. With more time to identify and nurture the strengths of each child and to respond to their differing learning needs, they can better guide them to a more resilient and self-determining future of lifelong learning. In my view this is the most impactful strategy for addressing the teacher recruitment and retention crisis. 

Conversely, the greatest risk to the teaching profession is to ignore this evidence, passively allowing learners to develop the habits of using AI more as an 'answer-machine' than as a learning tool. Whenever I hear people complain of students using LLMs to cheat, I worry that we are missing the big opportunity and misdirecting our efforts.

We should not delude ourselves that AI in education is primarily a technical problem for the technologists to solve. It is first and foremost a teaching, learning and assessment challenge that the education profession needs to own. Of course there are complex aspects of the challenge which are cultural, political and technological, but we must not use that as an excuse to disown the challenge.

Like any new technology, the worthy and aspirational goals of generative AI will be shaped, and potentially corrupted, by the demands of those investing in it. Or by those influencing its application in everyday life. For all the reasons above, leaders in education have a responsibility to contribute to the development of quality assurance processes and governance structures for the effective and ethical use of AI in the areas over which we have influence. 

Oral assessment - the future

It seems likely that those with strong traditional literacy skills (including critical thinking) are more likely to thrive in an LLM world, and vice versa. So it is more important than ever that we do not fail our young people in these aspects of their education. Going further, to monitor the unintended consequences of AI, we must ensure that new channels and tools for oral presentation and assessment are developed and applied wherever and whenever we encourage the use of AI in the classroom and in the assessment process. Rather than worrying about students using LLMs to 'cheat' we must explore ways to encourage the increased learning-efficiency benefits of LLMs.  This includes finding more effective ways to assess that learning. Oral assessment may become the most reliable way to assess the integrity of students' understanding and their learning capacity. This implies quite a fundamental rethink about how to deploy the human resources of teaching and learning in new methods of formative, summative and (inter)nationally recognised and accredited standards of assessment. But such a major change in the assessment system requires open-mindedness, professional and political consensus and the resources to develop new solutions. After 12 years in the education sector, I am more realistic about what it will take to achieve these things. 

Much has been written, and for many years, about the glaring obsolescence of the current examinations system. In his 2025 BETT keynote address, Stephen Fry described it as a system that 'tests for ignorance and punishes us'.  As a one-time English A-level teacher, I can certainly personally attest to the weaknesses in GCSE English, as powerfully described in ASCL's much-cited 2019 report The Forgotten Third. But realistically there will be no substantial improvements in national summative assessment methods until we can embrace a more comprehensive reform of our learning and assessment ecology to accommodate the new age of oracy and AI. 

Society tends to value most highly those things it can measure. In this respect I'm a strong supporter of the Rethinking Assessment movement. It might seem like putting the cart before the horse to drive reform of the curriculum from the assessment system. But being pragmatic, it will be the reform of assessment that will most likely stimulate the necessary behavioural shifts in the notoriously change-averse education sector.

The future of authorship, authority and the integrity of human knowledge

Technology evolution is awesome. It can enlighten and empower, but it can also obscure, deceive and exclude. The authorial identity, reliability and integrity of what is published now seems more fragile and fluid than it did when I was young. Levels of trust in previously respected media brands (e.g. broadcasters and newspapers) seem to be declining, especially amongst the young.

Mistrust arises not necessarily because we are better informed. Nor is it because we are thinking more critically. It has more to do with the sheer volume of competing sources of human stimuli, peer-pressure and FOMO, whether these stimuli are for our education, our recreation or other forms of consumption. This is one of the themes in Johann Hari's thought-provoking book Stolen Focus (2022). Unable to cope with the overwhelming number of choices, we welcome the diversions created by clever and attractive design and/or by manipulative algorithms which shape and feed our preferences. This occurs even if we suspect that our behaviour is becoming compulsive or addictive, or that our biases (conscious or unconscious) are being cynically exploited and compounded. This is also partly what David Courtwright has described as 'limbic capitalism' in his 2019 book The Age of Addiction - How Bad Habits Became Big Business.

These kinds of developments over the last half-century sadly run counter to all of the more positive and constructive progress in human civilization. We must recognise that as much as technology can make us smarter, it can equally make us lazier. It can contribute to complexity-aversion and its dark consequences. I can recall quite vividly how, in the first decade of the 21st century as more voices became heard, it looked as though the internet and new media channels might contribute to a more pluralistic, well-informed and equitable world. The so-called Arab Spring was a good example of this optimism. With hindsight it was over-optimistic. Evgeny Morozov's The Net Delusion (2011) provided a scathing critique of those who proclaimed the internet as an inherently democratizing phenomenon. His illustrations of the internet's susceptibility to the corruption and abuse of 'knowledge' have sadly proven accurate.  

To conclude my reflections with a question, I find Michel Foucault’s words prescient and particularly apt for a 21st century world where meaning and relevance are ever harder to extract from the exploding babble of texts, images and sounds. In his 1969 publication What is an Author? he writes:

  'The author is therefore the ideological figure by which one marks the manner in which we fear the proliferation of meaning'. 

Fear is a key word here. How much meaning do we want, or indeed, how much can we cope with? 

Enough doom and gloom. I'm more optimistic than the last few paragraphs might suggest. As I move towards a more reflective stage in my career, I hope to make at least a tiny contribution to a more coherent, stable and equitable world.

If you feel that we might usefully share ideas or collaborate in some way, please don't be shy about reaching out. Send me an email or connect via LinkedIn, indicating that you've looked at this site. 

Dr Jonathan (aka Joff) Wheeldon

jofftherecorduk@gmail.com

Footnotes

*Ben Elton's ironic AI antonym 'authentic stupidity' neatly expresses the risk caused by replacing skills such as critical thinking, emotional intelligence or plain old 'common sense', with a lazy or premature reliance on artificial intelligence. 

** often attributed to E.M. Forster, Graham Wallas, Andre Gide or W.H.Auden. It captures the idea that language tends to construct our reality rather than just describing it.

*** AI Fight Club is a metaphor coined by Henry Farrell to describe the polarised positions around the future of AI. See his article at Programmablemutter.com 17/12/2024.

**** I am indebted to Nicholas Carr's brilliant book The Shallows (2010) for some of the content in this paragraph. His book Superbloom - How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart is one of the most anticipated books of 2025.