This is a guest post by Nick Boden(University of Bristol)
Teachers and academics face questions relating to freedom each day. How will students engage with the material? How should students be in the learning environment? Are students free to choose tasks or are their choices constrained by the practitioners preferred methods? These questions place instructors at the centre of an ongoing debate about freedom. Is freedom simply the absence of constraints? Or is there more going on?
At first glance, Isaiah Berlin’s (1958) idea of positive and negative freedom offers a useful framework. Positive freedom can be thought of as “the freedom to”. Rules or regulations are put into place to increase the options available to you. Negative freedom is explained as “freedom from” constraints. Barriers are removed and options are available to you. For example, advocates of negative freedom would explain being left alone to make decisions and choices increases freedom. Whereas advocates of positive freedom would welcome things like welfare funding, taking away the “freedom from” taxes, to “provide freedom to” buy basic goods whilst unemployed. A form of collective freedom.
It has always been clear that ChatGPT’s general availability means trouble for higher education. We knew that letting students use it for writing essays would make it difficult if not impossible to assess their effort and progress, and invite cheating. Worse, that it was going to deprive them of learning the laborious art and skill of writing, which is good in itself as well as a necessary instruments to thinking clearly. University years (and perhaps the last few years of high school, although, I worry, only for very few) is the chance to learn one’s writing and thinking. When there is quick costless access to the final product, there is little incentive for students to engage in the process of creating that product themselves; and going through that process is, generally, a lot more valuable than the product itself. Last March, philosopher Troy Jollimore published a lovely essay on this theme. So, we knew that non-regulated developments in artificial intelligence are inimical to this main aim of higher education.
Even more concerning news are now starting to find us: Not only is the use of ChatGPT bad for students because the temptation to rely on it is too hard to withstand, but respectable studies such as a recent one authored by scholars at MIT show that AI has significant negative effects on users’ cognitive abilities. The study indicates that the vast majority of people using Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, in order to write, forget the AI-generated content within minutes. Neural connections for the group relying on natural intelligence-only were almost twice as strong as those in the group using LLMs. And regular users who were asked to write without the help of LLMs did worse than those who never used ChatGPT at all. The authors of the study are talking about a “cognitive debt”: the more one relies on AI, the more they lose thinking abilities. All these findings are true of most users; a silver line, perhaps, is that users with very strong cognitive capacities displayed higher neural connection when using LLMs.
In short, LLMs are here to stay, at least until proper regulation – which is not yet on the horizon – kicks in; if this study is right, they can give valuable support to the more accomplished scholars (perhaps at various stages of their career) while harming everybody else. Part of the university’s job is to develop the latter group’s cognitive abilities; encouraging students to use LLMs appears, in light of these considerations, a kind of malpractice. And assigning at home essays is, in practice, encouragement.
We humans are wired to hope. The very act of planning is fueled by hope that tomorrow will come, that the object of our hope is achievable, and that we will have the resolve to take concrete actions towards it.
Such a personal emotion might seem to have little place in the law. After all, hope is not something a court can simply grant. And yet, recent developments in European human rights law have begun to suggest that the law might have a role in fostering, or even protecting, the fragile social conditions that make hope possible. Specifically, European human rights law has begun to develop the idea that there may be a legal right to hope in the context of prison sentences, and particularly life sentences.[1] This refers to the notion that sentences must carry ‘a prospect of release and possibility of review’.[2] It raises a host of interesting questions – many of which were investigated at a recent LSE Law working paper series which we participated in.
Over the last few weeks, I have been marking exams for the economic ethics course I taught this year. The experience has not been particularly joyful. Admittedly, marking rarely is, but it gets worse when one develops a feeling of uselessness and failure, as I experienced on this occasion.
The source of this feeling was the realization of the grip of inegalitarian ideologies on my students. Since most of them were studying business, I should maybe have expected it, but I naïvely hoped that their ethics course might have led them to somewhat question their inegalitarian beliefs. And perhaps it has. It would take a combination of anonymous ex-ante and ex-post opinion surveys to measure it.
Whether it would be ethical to conduct such a survey is an interesting question (your opinions are welcome), but not the one I wanted to discuss in this post. The one I am concerned with is whether it would be acceptable, from an ethics of teaching perspective, to engage more straightforwardly in ideology-critique in my course, in the future.
This blog explores issues of justice, morality, and ethics in all areas of public, political, social, economic, and personal life. It is run by a cooperative of political theorists and philosophers and in collaboration with the Journal of Applied Philosophy.
