Have you ever heard of the vaudeville performer, Hadji Ali? A century ago, Ali was a minor hit as an entertainer for what Wikipedia (2024) calls “acts of controlled regurgitation.” He could consume various objects and substances and spew them back out at will. For example, he would swallow different colored handkerchiefs, sort them in his stomach, then hawk them up one at a time per audience request. His famous closing act was to drink a mixture of water and kerosene and, in turns, set fire to and then extinguish a stage prop by spitting out the appropriate fluid on demand.
Upon reading Ali’s story, my initial reflex was of course to throw up, but after quashing that urge my thoughts naturally turned to my students. How often, I wondered, had they been asked on mid-term quizzes to perform mental acts of regurgitation not unlike Ali’s gastric exhibitions? And did they resent me for all the intellectual heaving they had to go through? Thinking about it made me feel depressed, and a little nauseated.
I hate mindless repetition exercises as much as the next teacher, but we know that sometimes learning requires rehearsal and rote repetition. Without it, you’re like that friend who usually hates karaoke but gets too drunk one night and decides to cold start a Celine Dion song. I myself am a poor language rehearser: On a rainy day, I might see a rainbow, but the proper Japanese term for it, niji, never seems to pop into my head. I’ll have called it a pheasant (kiji), a screw (neji), or an onion (negi) before I come up with the right word, and by then the initial awe of nature will be lost. It would also do me good someday to sit down and write the word “weird” a hundred times on a sheet of paper because I always get stuck after the “w”, forgetting which vowel comes next. Someone once even taught me a mnemonic phrase for it: “‘I’ before ‘E’...unless you’re weird.”
Speaking of weird, there’s AI: weird, weird, weird. I’m sure that in 10 years, we’ll all be maintaining perfectly normal, healthy, monogamous relationships with our own personalized bot buddies. At present, socio-intellectually, artificial intelligence is like a bizarre new next-door neighbor, who seems outgoing and glad to know you, but when you actually start chatting him up, he responds by going off on wild tangents of murky affairs that you feel you’re not supposed to be hearing about. He also displays hideous home-made found-object sculptures in his front yard that scare the children and discourage you from inviting your friends over for dinner. That’s the nature of my attitude towards AI right now. To help me with my problem, I’ve sought advice from several SNS friends who specialize in impersonating specialists, and collectively they’ve diagnosed my condition as “the creeps.” You can hardly blame me when you witness the twisted ways that AI and its devotees consume genuine culture—academic, popular, and so on—and spit it back out at the world: essays citing research studies that don’t exist (and would violate global ethics codes if they did); photographs of movie stars with six-fingered hands; TV commercials advertising explosive, flesh-eating watermelons; and so on ad nauseum.
The AI encounters that bother me the most, really, are the written ones. Their subtlety can be very unnerving. I once asked my students to write in their online journals about a personality trait that they would like to improve in themselves. Most wrote earnest replies, saying they’d like to be nicer or manage their time better. One student submitted a long paragraph that started out, “I have often thought about which personal characteristic I would like to improve.” Suddenly, though, her submission took a turn: “This is a particularly challenging question for me, since as you know I am only artificial intelligence and I do not really have personality traits per se.”
My student had literally copied and pasted my assignment to an AI site, then copied the result into her journal without even reading it. I was of course furious at her for cheating, but also eerily moved by the wistful, Pinocchio-like tone of the chatbot’s reply. Despite that poignant tug, I gave the student 0 points for her journal. I responded, “Next time at least do me the courtesy of reading what you plagiarize from ChatGPT.” Perfecting an art requires practice. Before one can trick the teacher with AI, one must master the basics of tricking in general. It’s like asking Hadji Ali to throw up a blue handkerchief and he throws up a tuna fish sandwich instead.
Reference
Hadji Ali. (2024, October 28). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadji_Ali
