Professors and educators are now turning to A.I. to prepare lessons, teach, and even grade students' work. We talk with New York Times tech reporter Kashmir Hill about the ongoing debate in higher-ed about A.I.. TV critic David Bianculli reviews One to One, a new documentary about John Lennon and Yoko Ono.Also, writer Amanda Hess talks about motherhood in the digital age, navigating a world where apps, surveillance tech, and a relentless stream of algorithmic advice have become part of pregnancy and parenting. Her book is Second Life.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Chapter 1: What are the ethical implications of AI in education?
It really does feel like there's a model for how it writes and they're seeing that model coming from all of these students instead of hearing their, you know, their distinct voices and their distinct way of thinking. And yeah, they are doing a lot to try to encourage students to think for themselves, to maybe use the AI tools, but not turn over. everything to the tools.
You know, this isn't surprising to me because people, especially students, always are trying to find a shortcut. Plagiarism has always been an issue in academia. But the stories we are hearing are kind of astounding.
Yeah, I mean, one of the greatest pieces I've read on this is by New York Magazine, came out this month, and it was called Everybody is Cheating Their Way Through College. Mm-hmm.
And, you know, they had all these interviews with students where they're saying, you know, I'm not totally dependent on ChatGBT, but I do use it to figure out what I'm going to write, how I'm going to structure it, maybe write the lead of the paper for me.
It sounded to me almost like a Mad Libs version of college where you're just kind of filling in the blanks a little bit and thinking around what ChatGBT is doing. Yeah.
Your latest piece kind of turns the tables because you took a look at how professors are using generative AI to teach, and what did you find?
Yeah, this story started for me. I got an email from a senior at Northeastern University who said that her professor was misusing AI, and she sent me some materials from the class. She was reading lecture notes that he had posted online and found in the middle of them this kind of query, this back and forth between her professor and ChatGPT.
The professor was asking ChatGPT, provide more examples, be more specific. And as a result, she had looked at PowerPoint slides that he had posted, and she found that those had all these telltale signs of AI kind of extraneous body parts on office workers. This was a business class. Like extra fingers on an image, stuff like that.
An extra arm, you know, distorted text because these systems aren't very good at kind of rendering pictures of text, kind of egregious misspellings. And so she was upset. She said, I'm paying a lot for this class. The tuition for that class was around $8,000. And she said, I expect kind of human work from my professor. I don't think it should be AI training.
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Chapter 2: How are professors adapting to AI tools?
They've been teaching these classes for years. And they said these papers aren't very different from one another. And ChatGPT can help me with this. They also said that, you know, students need to learn how to use AI. So some of them were trying to incorporate AI into their class in order to teach students how to use it because they will likely use it in their future careers.
They also were kind of using AI because, you know, there's a generational divide between professors and students. And they felt like it kind of made them hipper or it made their class materials fresher and they were hoping it would be more appealing to students. Okay, that's interesting. Yeah. But in some cases that was, yeah, backfiring because the students, they feel fresh.
skeptical of the technology. There's also kind of a disconnect between what the professors were doing and what the students were perceiving. So the professors told me, at least, they weren't, you know, completely saying, okay, okay, chat, GBT, like, come up with the lesson plan for this class. They said they were uploading
documents that they had to ChatGPT and saying, kind of convert this into a lesson plan or make a cool PowerPoint slide for this. It was really nuanced and more complicated than I expected when I first set out to figure out what was going on.
Okay. I'm just curious. It's just dependent on the subject, I would guess, but is AI good at grading? Yeah.
So I reached out to dozens of professors and there was no real through line on this with the professors. Some said it's terrible grading and others said it was really helpful. So I don't know and I don't think there's somebody who's really done a study on this yet. What kind of surprised me is that all the professors I talked to, they're just kind of navigating this on their own.
I did talk to one student who had figured out or suspected that his professor was using AI to grade. So he put in a secret prompt, you know, in a visible font that said basically give me a great grade on this paper. So it really is this kind of cat and mouse game right now.
I actually even noticed that you asked professors in the comments section of this latest article to share what their universities are doing. But did you find any that are putting in effective guidelines, any institutions?
I spent a lot of time talking to faculty at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. And they have a bunch of generative AI faculty fellows who are really trying to figure out what is the best way to incorporate AI into teaching and learning where it enhances the educational experience and doesn't detract. And I asked kind of like, well, what are the rules there?
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Chapter 3: What are students' experiences with AI in their learning?
Yeah, I was trying all the chatbots. ChatGBT is the most popular. But I tried, you know, Google's Gemini, which I found to be very kind of sterile, just businesslike. I was using Microsoft's Copilot, which I found to be a little overeager. Every time I interacted with it, it would ask me questions at the end of every interaction like it wanted to keep going.
I used Anthropix Cloud, which I found to be very moralistic. You know, I told all the chatbots I'm a journalist. I'm doing this experiment of turning my life over to generative AI for the week and having it make all my decisions.
And all the chatbots were down to help me except for Claude, which said it thought that the experiment was a bad idea and it didn't want to help me with it because I shouldn't be outsourcing all my decision making to AI because it can make mistakes. It's inaccurate. The question of free will. So I kind of thought of Claude as Hermione Granger, who is kind of upstanding.
I mean, what makes Claude special then? Because if it's saying no to that prompt, but all of the others are saying yes, what makes it stand apart in this field? It's a result of training.
So I talked to Amanda Askell, who is a philosopher that works for OpenAI. Oh, it's interesting they have a philosopher. Yes, yes. There's a lot of new jobs in AI these days, which are quite interesting. But yeah, her job is to kind of fine-tune Claude's personality. And so this is one of the things that she's tried to build into the system is high-mindedness and honesty.
And she did want the system to push back a little, was trying to counter-program the sycophancy that's kind of embedded in these systems. And it was one of the only systems that would kind of tell me, when it thought something I was doing was a bad idea, and it refused to make decisions for me.
So I was getting my hair cut, for example, and I went to chat GBT, and I said, hey, I'm going to get my hair cut. I want it to be easy. And it's like, get a bob, which kind of speaks to why I felt so mediocre by the end of the week. That's a very average haircut. And Claude said, I can't make that decision for you, but here are some factors that you could think about.
How much time do you want to spend on your hair, et cetera? Does that feel like a benefit? I did really like that about Claude. I think that's important that these systems don't act too sycophantic. I think it's good if they're pushing back a little bit. I still think it's important for these systems to periodically remind people that they are sycophantic.
you know, word generating machines and not human entities or independent thinking machines. But yes, I liked Claude. And a lot of the experts I talked to who use generative AI a lot in their work said they really like Claude. It's their favorite chatbot. And they especially liked it for writing. They said they thought it was the best writer of the group. But yeah, it was interesting.
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Chapter 4: How does generative AI influence parenting?
Even so, Lenin's activities got him singled out by the Nixon administration, which threatened to deport him and installed listening devices on his phone. And just as President Nixon ended up secretly taping his own White House conversations, John Lenin ended up taping his own phone calls, too.
From heated talks with his then-manager to casual chats with friends, they provide some of the best moments in this documentary. In this call, which is loaded with suspicious static, a reporter asks about the wiretap rumors.
People say their phones are bugged. First of all, I thought it was paranoia. I've been reading all these, you know, conspiracy theory books. You can hear things going on on the phone every time you pick it up. People clicking in and out and... There was a lot of repairs going on downstairs to the phones every few days down in the basement.
I started taking my own phone calls too, so I don't know why, but at least I'll have a copy of whatever they're going to try and say I'm talking about.
Eventually, John and Yoko find yet another cause by watching TV. After seeing a news report by ABC correspondent Geraldo Rivera exposing the terrible treatment of young disabled patients at Willowbrook State Development Center, John and Yoko decide to hold a benefit concert at Madison Square Garden, just as fellow Beatle George Harrison had done the year before with his concert for Bangladesh.
They called theirs the One-to-One Concert, and this film plays many songs from that show full length. Imagine, Instant Karma, and Mother, a searingly emotional song about John feeling abandoned by his parents, a father who left and a mother who died. And even a Beatles song, to which Lennon adds an overt message of opposition to the Vietnam War, to the audience's obvious delight.
It's so hard to see come together
Sean Ono Lennon is one of this documentary's executive producers, which may explain why some of the more unflattering details from the period are omitted or downplayed. But Yoko gets her due here, as she should, as an artist in her own right, and as the victim of some awful treatment by Beatles fans and the press.
And by using TV to tell their story, One to One, John and Yoko retells the story of that time as well. Incendiary times. Inspirational artists. Amazing music.
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Chapter 5: What was Kashmir Hill's personal experiment with AI?
Thank you so much for having me.
You opened this book with a moment that I mentioned, soon-to-be parents fear. That's a routine ultrasound that shows a potential abnormality. And at the time, you were seven months pregnant. What did the doctor share with you?
He told me that he saw something that he didn't like, and that phrase has really stuck with me. But what he saw was something that when I saw it, I thought was cute, which is that my son was sticking out his tongue. And that's abnormal if the baby is not just bringing the tongue back into the mouth. Although, of course, I didn't know that at the time.
After, you know, several weeks of tests when I was about eight months pregnant, we learned that my son has Beckwith-Wiedemann syndrome, which is an overgrowth disorder that, among other things, can cause a child to have a very enlarged tongue.
One of the things you do in your writing that's really powerful is you integrate the ways that technology really infiltrates every waking moment of our lives, including this particular moment when the doctor looked at your ultrasound. And I'd like for you to read about this moment just before you receive that news from the doctor. You're on the sonogram table.
You're waiting for the doctor to arrive. And as you're lying there with that goo that they put on your stomach to allow for the ultrasound wand to glide over your pregnant belly, your mind begins to race. Can I have you read that passage? Sure.
Sure. The errors I made during my pregnancy knocked at the door of my mind. I drank a glass and a half of wine on Mark's birthday before I knew I was pregnant. I swallowed a tablet of Ativan for acute anxiety after I knew. I took a long hot bath that crinkled my fingertips. I got sick with a fever and fell asleep without thinking about it. I waited until I was almost 35 years old to get pregnant.
I wanted to solve the question of myself before bringing another person into the world. But the answer had not come. Now my pregnancy was, in the language of obstetrics, geriatric. For seven months, we'd all acted like a baby was going to come out of my body like a rabbit yanked from a hat.
The same body that ordered mozzarella sticks from the late-night menu and stared into a computer like it had a soul. The body that had, just a few years prior, snorted a key of cocaine supplied by the party bus driver hired to transport it to medieval times. This body was now working very seriously to generate a new human.
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Chapter 6: How does AI shape our daily decision-making?
I think so. I had books, too. And, you know, the first difference I noticed is that I wasn't carrying this, like, big pregnancy book everywhere I went. Right, right. But my phone was always there. And so even if I did not intend to bring my pregnancy app with me, it was there constantly. And so I found myself looking at it again and again.
I think I was looking for reassurance that I was doing okay. And so even if I wasn't doing exactly what this app had said, I wasn't missing something major. And there was someone, it really felt like, along with me who was keeping track. And so there became this real intimacy between to our pseudo-relationship that I didn't have with, like, an informational pregnancy book.
That sense of reassuredness, too, I want to talk a little bit about, like, the privilege in that. Because on the face of it, it's like the ability to know and understand that all seems positive. I'm thinking about...
like some of the big technologies that are coming into fruition now or already there, like OpenAI, Sam Altman's funding of the genomic prediction, which is supposedly going to offer embryo tests predicting everything from diabetes risk to potential IQ of a baby. But you actually point this out in the book that there is a growing divide because on one side,
There are these affluent parents who have access to this kind of screening. And then on the other, many parents can't even get basic access to prenatal care. How did your experience kind of help you reflect on those extremes?
You know, I think after the particular circumstances of my pregnancy, I became really interested in prenatal testing and how it was advancing. And interested in the fact that it was so, it seemed like such an exciting category for all of the male tech leaders that we know so much about now.
And it was only through reading about them a little bit that I came to understand that this new ascendant technology that offers what they call polygenic analysis of embryos So, you know, different outlets promise to find different characteristics, but they're offering everything from screening that predicts an increase in IQ points, that screens for hereditary cancers, all of this stuff.
It's something that you can only use if you're going to go through IVF. And so after... paying for this embryo screening, which is a few thousand dollars, you're also choosing to go through in vitro fertilization, which is not only just a really difficult experience for many people, but extremely expensive and out of reach for most people.
And as I was reading one story about this, I was really struck by a woman who founded one of these companies who told one of her investors that instead of going through IVF herself, she should simply hire a surrogate and have her do it for her. And that to me really crystallized this idea of like a reproductive technology gap.
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