Language & Life

Artificial intelligence or 'authentic stupidity'*?  (5-10 mins)

The goal of this website is to help me make sense of the things that I have spent much of my life thinking about, professionally and personally. "How can I know what I think until I see what I say?" as someone once wrote. 

In particular, I'm interested in the future of education.

I've called this home page Language & Life because sensitivity to the nuances and subtle powers of language is vital. For me, language-sensitivity generates the most meaningful and lasting insights into how to survive and thrive in our diverse and complex world. I've felt this way for all of my adult-life, but the accelerating impact of artificial intelligence now places an even greater responsibility upon us to raise our game in thinking strategically about the future of education, research and literacy.

When I started to create this website in early 2023, ChatGPT had just been declared the latest 'game-changer' in large language models (LLMs). LLMs are the best known products of the branch of artificial intelligence known as 'generative AI'. There is now fierce competition between LLM providers, and their tools are getting stronger everyday. They are having a huge impact on the evolution of our species, in particular:

• how teaching, learning and research are most efficiently conducted

• how knowledge is produced, authenticated and ranked for value and relevance

• how power and influence are distributed throughout society

With only basic online access, it is now very easy for any of us to pose and answer any question, and to produce plausible and eloquent textual answers. We can convert the output instantly into slick presentational formats, including into convincing human dialogue such as a podcast. Although many people lost patience with the first wave of personal AI assistants (Siri and Alexa), the latest chatbots such as ChatGPT and PI are likely to proliferate much more widely, with huge implications for bespoke learning and for human relations.

This is marvellous, but sometimes the critical-thinking skills and the deep-learning processes are conveniently by-passed. LLM answers are not always accurate or wise, but they will inevitably become more and more plausible and relied upon. As a result, the term literacy is being redefined. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that what we understand by the word literacy is being culturally renegotiated. 

Along with hope,  AI is also generating fear.  Only time will tell if (and how far) we have fallen into the black hole of so-called 'technological singularity'. This is the term used to describe the state where superhuman AI is irreversibly out of control. A state where a majority of humans have been charmed into being the serfs of dominant AI, without the skills or the will to resist and overcome their 'oppressor'. In the most disturbing vision, we won't even be aware of our oppression, perhaps because AI has made life seem easier and has removed the compulsion to question our own lack of agency and our diminished free will.

Of course this is not a new fear. Aldous Huxley's classic novel Brave New World (1932) is highly relevant to discussions of being oblivious to our soft oppression through hegemony. Arguably, so is Francis Fukuyama's famous 1992 claim about 'the end of history', i.e. the ultimate victory of liberal democracy and free-market capitalism over competing totalitarian fascist or communist ideologies. Some would say this was a premature claim to a dominant political and economic singularity into which the 'developed world' has been too easily seduced by superficial improvements in standards of living, and through rampant and cynically-exploited consumerism. Not exactly Huxley's ironic brave new world, but as I'm now reflecting (in 2025) there are some parallels with his dystopian vision.

Amongst many more recent books presenting a vision of an AI future, Ray Kurzweil's latest The Singularity is Nearer (2024), Yanis Varoufakis' Technofeudalism (2023), Mustafa Suleyman's The Coming Wave (2023) and Yuval Noah Harari's Homo Deus (2015) capture alternative positions on these concerns very well. 

Whether post-singularity existence turns out to be heaven or hell is a profound 21st century question that we should all ponder.  The question will not be resolved anytime soon. In the meantime we must do what we can to research, debate and determine the optimal role of AI in education to give the best chance for an acceptable outcome for humanity.

A new age of oracy

Another impactful consequence of LLMs (in conjunction with the extraordinary pace of evolution in voice AI such as voice-typing and automated voice generation) is that the distinction between literacy and its educational 'poor cousin' oracy is becoming blurred. The opportunities are great, but the risk is that people are reading less (or at least less patiently and less diligently), whilst speaking / typing / copying / pasting more rapidly, causing a potential decline in quality, accuracy and understanding. 

Speech is natural and came first. We are born with the neural wiring for speech, but reading and writing are less ‘natural’ skills, only acquired through education and through evolutionary technologies such as the alphabet, printing and publishing. After just a few centuries of long-form curated and published text being king, we can now see the beginning of the end of the age of information eco-systems built on a reverence for printed text. This is partly because of the proliferation of non-curated self-published electronic text. Being inundated by hyperlinked documents, slides, emails and multiple channels of news, promotions and instant messaging, it is impossible for us to read everything that appears on our screens.

There is now a huge demand for long-form texts to be synthesised and summarised. It should be no surprise that there is a desire to develop more productive and dynamic oral interactions: with technology; with 'big data'; and with each other. Oracy is not just about speaking. It is the ability to articulate ideas, actively listen, develop understanding and engage with others through spoken language. I explore some of the consequences of this trajectory towards a new age of oracy** in the website section "All the World's a Stage" - Securing Human Roles in an AI Future.

In education, our curriculum, assessment and teacher-training methods are terribly slow in adapting to these evolving aspects of our culture. This puts pressure on teachers to figure things out for themselves and to experiment. Some are resistant to change. Others embrace generative AI, not only to produce/adapt learning materials, but also to support the assessment of their pupils' needs and their output. But meaningful and equitable progress in the profession of teaching is hampered when the institutional systems of learning and assessment show no signs of evolving to accommodate the ways in which the world is changing.  

The sector must get over its fear and build pro-actively on the increasing evidence that AI augments human teaching rather than replacing it. When developed and applied rigorously, AI and other Edtech not only enhance learning, but also make teaching a more sustainable and rewarding career-choice. In my view this is the most impactful factor in addressing the teacher recruitment and retention crisis. The greatest risk to the teaching profession is to ignore this evidence, passively allowing learners to develop the habits of using AI more as an 'answer-machine' than as a learning tool.

Like any new technology, the worthy and aspirational goals of generative AI will be shaped, and potentially corrupted, by the demands of those investing in it. Or by those influencing its application in everyday life. For all the reasons above, leaders in all walks of life (especially in education) have a responsibility. We must provide adequate quality assurance processes and governance structures for the effective and ethical use of AI in the areas over which we have influence. 

It seems likely that those with strong traditional literacy skills (including critical thinking) are more likely to thrive in an LLM world, and vice versa. So it is more important than ever that we do not fail our young people in these aspects of their education. Going further, to monitor the unintended consequences of AI, we must ensure that new channels and tools for oral presentation and assessment are developed and applied wherever and whenever we encourage the use of AI in the classroom and in the assessment process. Oral assessment may become the most reliable way to assess students' understanding and the integrity of their learning capacity.

Much has been written about the obsolescence of the current GCSE format (especially GCSE English, the flaws in which I can personally attest to), but realistically there will be no substantial improvements in national summative assessment methods until we can embrace a more comprehensive reform of our assessment ecology to accommodate the new age of oracy and AI. 

Society tends to value most highly those things it can measure, and in this respect I'm a strong supporter of the Rethinking Assessment movement. It might seem like putting the cart before the horse to drive reform of the curriculum from the assessment system. But being pragmatic, it will be the reform of assessment that will most likely stimulate the necessary behavioural shifts in the notoriously change-averse education sector.

The future of authorship, authority and the integrity of human knowledge

Technology evolution is awesome. It can enlighten and empower, but it can also obscure, deceive and exclude. The authorial identity, reliability and integrity of what is published now seems more fragile and fluid than it did when I was young. Levels of trust in previously respected media brands (e.g. broadcasters and newspapers) seem to be declining, especially amongst the young.

Mistrust arises not necessarily because we are better informed. Nor is it because we are thinking more critically. It has more to do with the sheer volume of competing sources of human stimuli, peer-pressure and FOMO, whether these stimuli are for our education, recreation or other forms of consumption. This is one of the themes in Johann Hari's thought-provoking book Stolen Focus (2022). Unable to cope with the overwhelming number of choices, we welcome the diversions created by clever and attractive design and/or by manipulative algorithms which shape and feed our preferences. This occurs even if we suspect that our behaviour is becoming compulsive or addictive, or that our biases (conscious or unconscious) are being cynically exploited and compounded. This is partly what David Courtwright has described as 'limbic capitalism' in his 2019 book The Age of Addiction - How Bad Habits Became Big Business.

These kinds of developments over the last half-century sadly run counter to all of the more positive and constructive progress in human civilization. We must recognise that as much as technology can make us smarter, it can equally make us lazier. It can contribute to complexity-aversion and its dark consequences. I can recall quite vividly how, in the first decade of the 21st century as more voices became heard, it looked as though the internet and new media channels might contribute to a more pluralistic, well-informed and equitable world. The so-called Arab Spring was a good example of this optimism. With hindsight it was over-optimistic. Evgeny Morozov's The Net Delusion (2011) provided a scathing critique of those who proclaimed the internet as an inherently democratizing phenomenon. His illustrations of the internet's susceptibility to the corruption and abuse of 'knowledge' have sadly proven accurate.  

Enough doom and gloom. I'm more optimistic than the last three paragraphs might suggest. As I move towards a more reflective stage in my career, I hope to make at least a tiny contribution to a more coherent, stable and equitable world.

If you feel that we might usefully share ideas or collaborate in some way, please don't be shy about reaching out. Send me an email or connect via LinkedIn, indicating that you've looked at this site. 

Dr Jonathan (aka Joff) Wheeldon

jofftherecorduk@gmail.com

Footnotes:

*Ben Elton's ironic AI antonym 'authentic stupidity' neatly expresses the risk caused by replacing skills such as critical thinking, emotional intelligence or plain old 'common sense', with a lazy or premature reliance on artificial intelligence. 

**To understand more about the importance of oracy in education, link here to the excellent report of the Oracy Education Commission (October 2024). See also this link to a brief summary of Plato's imagined debate between the gods as to whether or not to grant the gift of writing to the Egyptian people.