Featured in the newest MIT The Tech new section is the the prescient question of AI and academia: “SHASS professors share wide-ranging views on AI in the classroom” written by Lit community student, Sabine Chu. Sabine asks SHASS professors to weigh in on the profound and profane “challenges and opportunities posed by AI.” The topic of AI asks both student and instructors: “What happens when students never learn how to write by themselves? What will be the effect on their academic, professional, and personal lives? What and how will they think? How might a HASS instructor structure their classes to accommodate this new world while continuing to instill fundamental skills?”
Read more from the Literature community here:
…Benjamin Mangrum, an associate professor of Literature, has taught CI-H courses every year since joining MIT in 2022. In that time, he has seen both students who “hate” AI and those who are “pretty explicit in their belief that it makes writing and other traditional humanistic activities seem obsolete.” In his current CI-H course, Reading Nonfiction (21L.050), which centers on the “craft of writing,” Mangrum prohibits AI use. However, he has revised his policy each semester and is “not opposed” to all types of AI use. He also uses AI to generate writing for in-class student analysis, as “it tends to be very competent but bland, and it’s useful to think about those qualities of prose.”
Mangrum believes that AI has intensified an existing popular view of the humanities as irrelevant. He said, “It tells many people what they already believe about the value of spending time studying history, philosophy, art, literature.”
Noel Jackson, also in the Literature Department, has addressed this problem by developing classes in which AI itself is “less relevant.” Last semester, he taught a course on the practice of walking in literature and film. Every week, students had to document their walks in journal entries that reflected on relevant reading material. Jackson knows that students can input enough information to generate a “plausible” entry. Still, he noted that “it would be easier, and I think more enjoyable too, if that student simply took a walk.”
In another course, Jackson has centered his pedagogy on questions generated by students. He believes that if students take the time to enjoy their own thoughts and those of their classmates, “we may find that the ‘superintelligence’ that purports to generate definitive answers for everything is not as nearly as interesting or as useful as what we can accomplish ourselves.”