Daring to err in the AI era

I am a bit afraid of AI’s enthusiasm for learning and its ability to become smarter with each task it is given. Representation Pic/iStock

Each time I have opened a Word document on my laptop to write my column in the last month, I see a set of prompts. Today, for instance, I see three potential instructions I could give AI: Create a short math quiz for a 5th grader; Create a vacation blog about hiking in Yellowstone National Park; and Create a list of ideas for school science projects about gravity. Below this is another text bar in which I'm invited to ‘Describe what I'd like to see'. Having read a few headlines about the devastating ecological impact of AI services like ChatGPT, how much water it uses each time it has to respond to a query, I feel unmotivated to try this out. I might be one of the few people who haven't yet used the service. As an examiner in a university, I have more than a hundred workarounds to the question of whether my students use ChatGPT to write their assignments. The easiest is to simply not give them the kind of assignments that they can palm off to such software. Instead, we do things with our hands to emphasise the embodied nature of feminist practice. I rely on creating an atmosphere of trust so that the students feel safe enough to share about the real circumstances of their life-their privileges as well as their oppressors.

Am I against the use of AI? I'm not sure where I stand on the debate. I'm definitely not in favour of how liberally human creativity is used to feed AI, and I'm unsure about the ramifications of copyright usage in our new reality. I am a bit afraid of AI's enthusiasm for learning and its ability to become smarter with each task it is given. Then again, someone asked AI to come up with an image of Indira Gandhi as ‘The Iron Lady' and found themselves with an image of a saree-clad illustration of the late Indian prime minister literally ironing clothes. Despite my hesitation around AI, my fear is simply that it gets increasingly smarter, possibly even more sentient, while human intelligence goes downhill, along with our capacity for empathy.

Did you know that in Italian, there's a special mode that gets activated when you want to express doubt or an opinion or a desire or hope? It's the conjugative mode, and it gets triggered the moment you use phrases like, ‘I think that' or ‘I hope that'. The idea is that it is clear that you are working in the region of personal thought, not fact, that there is cause for speculation, not certainty. Even though it means I have to learn a whole new set of conjugations, I like the spirit of this grammatical intervention. I've been thinking about it more and more as I prepare for the B2 level bilingual exam scheduled for mid-June, which I will most likely fail, because it's a lot tougher than previous exams. But the stakes are low, I lose nothing by failing. Instead, like I had hoped, it's an opportunity for me to actually improve my grasp of both languages. I already feel less hesitant about talking in Italian, and this time, on my vacation to Chioggia, which kicks off on Saturday, I'm determined to speak Italian consistently, even if someone responds to me in English.

Attempts at mastering these languages in order to pave the way for my future interactions in this region have been humbling because they've reminded me of the virtue of learning something from scratch. And learning anything requires that you actively work towards remapping your brain, encouraging it to rewire its pathways in order for new information, new modalities to be internalised. To do that, you need to embrace the fact that you come from a space of not knowing, that you are ignorant. This fact is humbling, because if you embrace your ignorance, you learn a lot faster.

These days, when I read transphobic, misogynist, queer-phobic, hate-fuelled comments, I feel sure that the speakers of these vile words have forgotten what it means to embrace the realm of speculation, to feel enthused by the power of discovery. Many of us are so obsessed with being perceived as being in the know, we cannot entertain the thought of being ‘schooled' by anyone, especially those different from us, who do not share our backgrounds. The abundance of AI-integration options is definitely not going to do us any favours in the humility department, which is a pity, because the beginning of any kind of learning is being humble enough to accept that one ‘doesn't know'.

Tomorrow in class, I'll be teaching my students to crochet. Instead of an elaborate mono-directional lecture about the historical invalidation of female labour, especially with the sectors of art and design, I imagine that getting them to embody the essence of my instruction through the clumsiness of doing something you never imagined doing is a more exciting mode of teaching. I hope they, like me, learn to learn from their failures and harvest their mistakes.

Deliberating on the life and times of every woman, Rosalyn D'Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She posts @rosad1985 on Instagram

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The views expressed in this column are the individual's and don't represent those of the paper