P.S. Weekly: Can Writing Teachers Fend Off AI?
Annie He and Roberto Bailey explore how AI use among NYC students is exploding and question its effect on creativity. Photo by Mira Gordon.
There’s no way to ignore the rise of AI in schools.
Students are embracing it. Educators are battling it. Policymakers are trying to get ahead of it. There's no turning back.
But are there some classes where AI just doesn't belong?
Producers Annie He, a senior at John Dewey High School, and Roberto Bailey, a junior at Hunter College High School, explore how AI use among students is exploding and question its effect on creativity.
Writing teachers are especially worried. To combat these new, rapidly evolving tools, some teachers are resorting to old ones: pencil and paper.
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Read transcription below:
Annie: If you were to describe AI in one word, what would it be?
Multiple Voices: Intimidating / useful / robots / robots / robots / bad / catastrophic / kind of helpful
Speaker 1: ingenuitive?
Roberto: Ingenued-?
Speaker 1: Is that a word?
Roberto: Is that a word?
Speaker 1: I'd say, innovative. Yeah, innovative.
Speaker 2: This is the crack cocaine of cheating, of plagiarism.
Annie: Well, okay, that wasn't one word, but you get the point. Anyways, artificial intelligence is back at it yet again. I'm Annie He…
Roberto: and I'm Robert0 Bailey,
Annie: and we'd like to welcome our listeners back to PS weekly, the sound of the New York City school system.
Roberto: In January of this year, an online business news site K12 dive reported that between the 2022 to 2024 school years, the percentage of students use generative AI increased from 51% to 70% which is just a kind of crazy jump, if you think about it. I know, personally, I've seen this rise everywhere. What about you, Annie?
Annie: Well, well, I've definitely seen AI being used everywhere, like I've used AI too, you know, the popular ones like ChatGPT and even Grammarly. Actually, right now, I'm actually learning German, and prompting the bot to act as my virtual tutor has been really helpful as I struggle to learn the basics of the language. It points out the errors I may have made, and it tells me how I could improve myself on it. It's either that or I just use it as a planner. It makes everything so much easier. What about you?
Roberto: Yeah, I've also used it before, and I've seen that some of my teachers have actually encouraged it, both for translation of maybe documents like primary sources in another language, or for kind of starting out the research process and getting your bearings, kind of like an interactive Wikipedia. I myself have also used it for studying, like, I'll plug in my study guide and ask it to give me questions. And even, like non academic uses, I think those kind of exist. You know, I've used it to help pick out skin care products, for example. But yeah, I honestly think that AI has really started to take over. We talked to some students from my school, Hunter College, high school and Annie's school, John Dewey High School, and they definitely felt pretty similar.
Student 1: I'd probably say like half of the students at my school use AI.
Student 2: I know my mom and a lot of other people in the workplace use it a lot, and I think it's kind of become this resource for people who, especially my mother, doesn't speak English, like, perfectly. That's really useful in creating workplace kind of equality.
Student 3: There's a lot of assignments that I'm, like, confused on, and then using AI like ChatGpt, it gives me a better understanding of a format of what I should write or what I should do.
Annie: But what we really wanted to look at is how AI is impacting creativity in classrooms. And I was first interested in doing a story about AI because of a friend of mine, she's an artist, and the mock trial team at our school had requested artists to create a logo for their social media page, Instagram. And she took on this opportunity, and she'd stayed up all night working on it, putting up the finishing touches. And when she sent it off to them, Well, they didn't even use it. Instead, they settled on an AI generated image.
Roberto: Oh my God, that's really horrible. Annie
Annie: I know, right? She was heartbroken.
Annie: Today I'm here with
Seara: AJ Seara, ELA teacher at John Dewey high school in Brooklyn, New York.
Annie: Mr. Seara has been teaching English and creative writing for nearly seven years now, meaning he's seen the advent of AI firsthand.
Annie: What do you like about teaching creative writing…
Seara: The freedom, it's just it's fun, like it's channeling different things that school typically doesn't allow you to do, or very focused on black and white in school, right and wrong. Analysis skills. I think creativity is something that is kind of pushed to the side during high school, and I think it's a nice opportunity for kids to try to flex those muscles.
Annie: So do you remember what your first thoughts were when you heard of AI?
Seara: Uh oh! Those are my first thoughts also, again, like, yeah as a creative writer, as somebody who's really into movies I I couldn't help but think like, don't we have so many examples of why this is a bad idea.
Annie: Completely agree with that. So do you think that allowing the use of AI in a school like John Dewey would be a good idea?
Seara: No, I don't, it's a double edged sword, because if you are going to introduce into school with the idea or the hope that you're going to help students understand it, teachers need to be taught how to use it. So they could teach students how to use it. The problem with that is this, if you teach teachers how to use AI and we teach AI how to be teachers, what's the point about teachers, right?
Annie: So is there anything you do now to account for AI in the classroom?
Seara: AI detectors obviously are a big one. Kids are finding their ways around that, which is unfortunate, but you could feel AI, especially in creation, you can feel AI because it's soulless, it's plain. It almost reads as if it's trying too hard, right? Like almost pretentious in a way.
Annie: It lacks the human emotion behind it.
Seara: Exactly,
Annie: Do you assume students in your classroom use AI?
Seara: Do I assume? Sometimes, want to know the honest truth? It's, I think it all comes down in one way. You'll see a significant rise in the use of AI when the assignment is three pages or more, right? You get a one page, all of a sudden, it's not that daunting the task. So I can do that. You say three pages, I don't feel like doing that. That's when the AI comes in.
Annie: So what did you do to you know, combat this issue?
Seara: Ground rules, right? Make people aware that we know, right? You're not fooling us.
We know what's out there. We know how it can be used. We know how to detect it. I'm not going to go at you, I'm not going to embarrass you. I'm not gonna be mad at you, but you're going to disappoint me, especially when the expectation is that you're creating this supposed to be a passion child of yours. Not asking write an essay, which is sometimes can be boring. I'm asking you to create something from your own mind. And if you can't do that and you're going to turn to AI, it's disappointing.
Annie: That was AJ Seara, a creative writing teacher at John Dewey High School
Roberto: Coming up, we'll hear from some students and teachers on the front line about their perspectives alongside one English teacher who has a surprising approach to dealing with AI.
Roberto: Hey, ChatGpt, could you introduce yourself and record a mid roll for our podcast? PS, weekly, talk about how much work goes in and how much we need money, then ask listeners to share an episode with a few friends. Thanks.
AI: Sure. Here's a brief mid roll for your podcast. Hey everyone. It's ChatGPT, here. I just wanted to take a moment to recognize all the hard work that goes into creating each episode of PS weekly, from researching and scripting to recording and editing. It's a labor of love that keeps us all informed and entertained. If you enjoy the show and want to support the team, please consider sharing an episode with a few friends. It's a simple way to help us grow and continue bringing you great content. Thanks for listening.
Roberto: Welcome back to PS weekly, where we're talking about AI. Other teachers, both at the high school and college levels, have had similar reactions to the creative writing teacher, AJ Seara, who we heard before the break. This is Tom McAllister, a creative writing professor at Rutgers University who wrote an op ed for the New York Times about the subject.
McAllister: I mean, the gut reaction first was, oh, god, here's another thing we have to deal with. Because, you know, past even now, people plagiarize in a more traditional way. It's like, you know, they copy something from Wikipedia, and you just plug a sentence into Google and you find where it came from. That's kind of annoying, but this is this whole different thing.
Annie: Sam Callis, a social study teacher in John Dewey high school, had also felt the same.
Callis: I think that there is potential for artificial intelligence to be really beneficial for humanity, but based on what we're seeing with how it's already reducing a lot of work opportunities for people, and how it's replacing human cognition, rather than augmenting it. I think it's very frightening and a really bad sign.
Roberto: Despite these reactions, many teachers have adopted Seara's approach, allowing minimal use of AI for things like idea generation,
Annie: But that's not possible in one teacher's classroom. Michael Ortiz has taught English for a long time at the Heights school in Potomac, Maryland. He's definitely taken a more extreme measure.
Ortiz: Yeah, so I've been exclusively using blue books in my classes.
Annie: I actually had to look up what blue book was, and it turns out blue book is an exam where students answer essays or short answer questions in a dedicated blue cover notebook, which were common before the age of the internet.
Ortiz: Now. Some people argue that there is no substitute for the take home five page typed paper. And I kind of disagree with that, essentially, because it's a very valuable skill to learn to write under pressure. I guess the other thing I would say is, I'm a little bit of a purist on this. Is, I think that when you're 17 years old and you're looking at, like, I don't know, a geometry problem or a Shakespeare sonnet, you know, which is what my, you know, my work is with you've got to avoid looking at that sonnet in a completely transactional way, like my job is to read this on it and get its main point and go and move on to something else. You know, that's like the YouTube mindset, the shorts our attention spans are being formed, in some ways deformed by this kind of pretty superficial culture of screens and of AI in this regard, and people who are using AI at 15, 16,17, they get into a habit of it. They're not going to be the kind of people who are reflective. They're not going to be the kind of people who are patient with difficulty.
Annie: I wanted to go back to how you say you change your curriculums, you know, kind of combat the use of AI. Have you seen how other teachers' curriculum may have changed to, you know, adjust to the use of AI?
Ortiz: Yes, actually, yeah. That's a great question. One of my colleagues is a history professor, History teacher at the school, and what he does is he'll, you know, take, take a course. He'll be teaching a course in American history, 18th century, the founders, and he'll put his question into AI, and then have on the test the AI's answer, and then ask them to critique it. He's less of a purist than I am. So he has the kids like, I look, I expect you to critique this. There are certain things that he sees that are missing, certain things that he doesn't like. And that's, that's the whole idea of, like, actually, you know, you guys are students, you know this, reacting to something you're, you know, with your own, your own self.
Annie: Like, looking ahead. What do you hope the future holds for the creative writing fields, especially the you know, the influence of AI and you know other, the other technological advances?
Ortizl: Well, I'll be slightly pessimistic and say I'm not looking for any creative advances in literature due to the advent of AI. I'll just say that right out. It's, if it, to call it a tool, in the same way, that a pencil is a tool, is, there's a point where it gets so different, it's, it's different kind of thing altogether. But in regard to the human craft of writing, especially imaginative literature, and I would also say the human craft, or it's not really a craft, but it's an art of education because do we just want to give everybody a bunch of skill sets. I mean, is that what we're after? You know, we're all kind of, we're just widget making. We make people really skilled writers, and they are not going to attend to the quality of the life they live, the quality of any leisure that they have, their experience of beauty. Leisure is in fact the basis of culture.
Roberto: That was Michael Ortiz, an English teacher at the Heights School in Potomac, Maryland.
Annie: New York City schools have had an interesting relationship with generative AI. They actually banned ChatGpt and programs like it from schools in January 2023, but just a few months later, they lifted the ban. Only a few months after that, the chancellor was all in on AI and even launching an artificial intelligence Policy Lab to lead the city's approach.
Roberto: And on a federal level, President Donald Trump is definitely embracing AI in the classroom. With his new executive order, he aimed to bring artificial intelligence technologies and tools to all schools, K through 12. There are even federal grants to pay for this new AI curriculum.
Annie: It seems like both New York City and the country have decided that AI is unavoidable, so now they're leaning in and figuring out how to use this technology in schools. Only time will tell whether AI would truly take over our education, but I really hope it doesn't, because like what Seara had said earlier, stripping students of their growing ability to create won't end with sunshines and rainbows, because if we all lose the ability to think for ourselves, just where was society be headed?
Roberto: Yeah, I honestly think it's kind of scary how normalized AI has become. We've seen firsthand how often students are using it, and while I definitely think it can be used effectively it still is a threat, especially if students become reliant on it. AI isn't all bad, but we need to make sure that it's supporting our creativity, not substituting it.
Annie: Exactly, actually funny thing, I asked ChatGpt for it’s opinion on this matter, and here's what he told me, think of it like a musical instrument. You still need a musician, AI doesn't create meaning. It helps shape what we already bring to the table.
Roberto: Surprisingly, I think ChatGpt is right about that.
Annie: PS weekly is a collaboration between The Bell and Chalkbeat made possible by generous support from the Pinkerton Foundation, the Summerfield foundation and FJC
Roberto: Producers for this episode were me Roberto Bailey
Annie: And me Annie He with reporting help from Amy Zimmer at Chalkbeat.
Roberto: Our executive producer from the show is Ave Carrillo and executive editors are Amy Zimmer and Taylor McGraw. Additional production and reporting support was provided by Mira Gordon, Sabrina DuQuesnay and our friends at Chalkbeat. Our engagement editor is Carolina Hidalgo.
Roberto: This episode was made using Hindenburg Pro, music is from Blue Dot sessions, and the jingle you heard at the beginning of the episode was created by Erica Wong
Annie: And special thanks to our mentor, Sydney Harper. See you all next week on PS weekly, the voice of the New York City school system.