An Encounter With the AI Hype Industry

The essay is still not dead

Photo by Product School on Unsplash

I attended a professional development seminar on AI in the classroom the other day. The presenter (I won’t name him here, because I don’t want to pick on him as an individual), a nationally-known consultant on educational technology, took us through the usual tech-enthusiast talking points:

• AI will kill zillions of existing jobs, and kids need to learn to prepare for the workplace of the future.
• This means that the most important skill we can teach kids is “prompt engineering.”
• If we’re not teaching kids to leverage AI, we’re holding them back. The example he used was a teenager who got ChatGPT to pump out dozens of college essays, implying that the kids who are actually producing their own writing samples are chumps.
• He kept saying stuff like: “Get ready, take a deep breath — the essay is dead!”

The presenter took us through a bunch of standard “look at what AI can do” exercises:

• He started with: “Don’t you hate looking up recipes on the internet?” I had not previously considered this a significant burden, but whatever. Then he had us get ChatGPT to build us a recipe based on the ingredients we had in our fridges. It spat out a recipe for cauliflower tacos. OK, fine. This is also…