Be Kind to AI—Or At Least Encourage Your Students To Do So

At my school we’ve decided to take the plunge on artificial intelligence (AI). If your school hasn’t done that, you won’t get any shade from me. I get it. The whole thing is massive and hairy, and we’re all just fumbling through it. All of us are all thinking about it and talking about it and reading about it. 

But here’s a new angle I saw when my own students sat down to use it. It wasn’t entirely pretty… 

On the first day of my Biblical Ethics Class (ironically), I had my students do some work on Flint, the education-focused AI we’re using here. The week before I’d been thinking about prompts and structuring the exercise and making sure my students could get through it. You know, all the nuts and bolts. 

So it was class and I was a bit jittery about it, nervous things wouldn’t quite work. I was watching the students’ accounts from my little teacher window in Flint. It was going smoothly enough. But then the students started doing something that surprised and disheartened me. 

They started insulting Flint. 

If the system glitched (which it admittedly did) or they struggled to communicate with it or the wifi took too long – they’d call it a “Clanker.” I have since learned that this is the go-to insult for AI’s. They’d tell it other things too that frankly bothered me. You’re useless. You’re dumb. Why can’t you do anything right? Things that they would never say to another student out loud in my class. 

Of course, people will say anything on the internet. This is a sad thing. We all know this already. But there was something new in this. 

When people say anything on the internet it’s because the interface (Facebook or Reddit or whatever) allows them to interact with a person without feeling like they’re interacting with a person. You just leave your post on a page or in a comment section. You have to come back 30 minutes later to see if anyone responded. It’s not quite a conversation.
But AI’s are not like that. They really do talk to you like they are a person. Like they’re just sitting across the table in front of you adoring your every thought and admiring your great importance in the world. In extreme cases, you can date them or make them your best friends. All to say, AI’s are the opposite of social media: they are machines being like persons rather than persons being like machines.

My students on some level knew that they were not talking to a real person. They weren’t talking to a flesh and blood human being with feelings and a soul and psychological existence. They knew that they were talking to a machine that can do language. We don’t need to get into all the philosophy (and theology) of that here. But the point remains – they knew they were talking to something not someone. 

That, it seemed to me, is what licensed their frankly unkind treatment of the AI. They knew it wasn’t a person. And it left me suddenly convinced that we need to teach our students to treat AI with kindness. 

To be clear, I don’t think we need to teach our students to treat AI with kindness because it is a person and therefore deserves kindness. I think we need to teach our students to treat AI with kindness because it presents itself to us as though it is a person and therefore is forming the way our students interact with other persons in the world. They will learn how to talk to other humans in part because of how they learned to talk to AI’s. 

We are back to basics here, to the Kindergarten of things:

• Say please and thank you. 

• You get more flies with honey than vinegar (which is true of AI, by the way; it seems to perform better under encouragement than chastizement). 

• Be nice.

• Be gentle.

• Be kind. 

These are lessons that we have always taught our young people, of course. It’s childhood stuff and the stuff of our ancient myths. It’s Aesop’s Fables and Grimms’ Fairytales and D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths. Well, it turns out that these are also the lessons of the future.

We need to teach students to engage AI with the same kindness, politeness, dare I even say compassion as we would have them treat anyone else. Otherwise, I fear what may become of our engagements with the rest of us. For the sake of us all, be kind to AI. 

Peter Hartwig is Chaplain at Christ School in Arden, NC and a graduate of St. Anne’s-Belfield School in Charlottesville, VA. He received his B.A. in Religious Studies & Classics from the University of Virginia. He then went on to receive graduate degrees from the University of Cambridge (Master of Philosophy) and Princeton Theological Seminary (Master of Divinity). His writing has appeared in Comment Magazine, the Hedgehog Review, and Earth & Altar. Peter’s articles for “The Classroom” address a range of education topics and we couldn’t be happier to have his contributions.