Last week, the Concord Monitor published a revealing front-page article on how student use of AI is a “burgeoning crisis in NH schools.” Reporter Jeremy Margolis interviewed high school students who described “feeling sapped of motivation” and “noticeable cognitive deterioration” as a result of AI use.
The article went beyond lamenting how using AI in this manner is outright cheating. Using students’ own words, Margolis highlighted how students had become discouraged. They felt, even if they tried hard and turned in their best work, the AI version another student submitted would be judged better and receive a higher grade.
Magolis’s indictment echoes that of Marc Watkins, a high school teacher writing on Substack: “When a machine can now mimic the work of a human being, many of us, especially students, must be asking what the point is anymore. That’s a much more dangerous and slippery problem than students submitting AI-generated work.”
Their discussion prompts me to ask fundamental questions: If AI can do everything better than humans, what role does that leave for us? At root, what does it mean to be a human being today? And, how do we self-actualize and find meaning in life in this brave new world?
What follows is my perspective as an 80-year-old whose life unfolded eons before AI. I will accomplish this by referencing two of my avocations to demonstrate how I find meaning in life. The first is photography.
When I was young and clueless, I stopped taking my clunky camera on vacation because I told myself I could buy postcards that captured the natural wonders I was visiting, more capably than I could with my camera. That is, until I took a couple of darkroom courses at the old Arts Institute in Manchester.
That’s when I discovered that I had hidden within me a unique vision of reality that inspired me, as opposed to the blah postcards. Ansel Adams once said that the photographic image you take, stored in your camera, is like the written musical notes in the score. However, the performance, in photographic terms, is not a concert but the final print, laboriously manipulated over and over again in the darkroom until it finally represents the photographer’s personal vision.
The unexamined life is like the image on the film — or an essay downloaded from AI. It is generic, divorced from your personal life. It is only when you dig in and make it your own, like making your own print in the darkroom, that it becomes personal and meaningful.
I’ve heard it said that it takes 20,000 repetitions to master a craft. Ernest Hemingway went even farther: “We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.” My own observation is that it is the very act of making an effort — the blood, sweat and tears you put into a project to manifest your personal take on life — that is the essence of what makes us human.
I think what is lost in discussions about high school is that it is not about regurgitating information to the teacher in order to get a good grade; it is about becoming proficient in the skills you will need to engage passionately with whatever strikes your fancy in life.
That applies to whatever your active passion is: cooking, woodworking, gardening, cleaning your house, waxing your car, whatever. Watching soap operas doesn’t count.
Writing is another one of my passions. The idea for an essay doesn’t come to me fully formed, like it was downloaded from AI. It usually arrives as a vague presence: piecemeal, incoherent, even contradictory. Mariah Faith Continelli on her Substack has perceptively written about what happens in this initial stage of writing:
“You had to sit with it, turn it over, test it, doubt it, lose patience with it. Sometimes you abandoned it. Sometimes it evolved. Occasionally, it became an original. That middle space, that uncomfortable, unresolved stretch, wasn’t a flaw in the process. It was the process.”
Engaging in that process is what turns a generic negative in my camera into a personal statement in the darkroom. But it’s bigger than that. Engaging in that process — which AI eliminates — is the very essence of what makes us human.
Jean Stimmell, retired stone mason and psychotherapist, lives in Northwood and blogs at jstim.substack.com.