AI TLDR

Today I read an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE) titled “My Students Can’t Read”, one of many I have read in recent years about the inability of many college students today to sustain the attention and focus to read academic material at length. Many reasons have been proffered for this alarming state of affairs including smartphones and COVID lockdowns; some hark back to the rise of television; but the most recent culprit is Generative AI.

 

Unfortunately, CHE has a paywall, so instead I’ll point you to Scriptorium Philosophia’s most popular post titled “the average college student today” which I read a year ago. It treads on similar ground as the CHE article, but it’s shorter to read, broader in scope, and funnier. Or if that’s still TLDR*, here are the three quoted highlights from the CHE article.

·      Every generation of professors has complained that their students cannot read. The lament is usually overblown, but data have caught up to anecdote.

·      The neural pathways that support sustained attention are built by use, and they atrophy without it. Your body is a use-it-or-lose-it system, and the brain is no exception.

·      Offloading tasks to a chatbot does not “free students up for higher order work”. It deprives them of building up strength to do any substantial cognitive work at all.

 

In the original article, these three quotes are blown up in larger font in separate boxes to catch your attention. Sort of like an abstract or summary. While I suspect a human editor picked them out to highlight, maybe AI could do this for you. (No, I didn’t copy-paste the article into ChatGPT and ask it to highlight the main three points to verify.) If you’re a busy person, and college students seem busier than a generation ago, then you might use AI-mediated TLDR – read the AI generated summary. I have so far resisted the temptation to use AI to skim or summarize research papers, but maybe that’s just the old-school stuck-in-my-ways curmudgeon in me. I don’t quite trust AI to give me the nuggets I might miss, but then again, I do wade through lots of irrelevant stuff. I suppose it’s mildly comforting to know that I have built up the ability to quickly pick out what I need to know and skim the rest.

 

Two weeks ago, a rep from the publisher of our G-Chem textbook emailed faculty to let them know of a new feature. You can now have AI summarize key points in the eTextbook. This just about guarantees students won’t read the actual textbook. Why bother when you can AI TLDR instead. We are inherently lazy and would rather save our ATP molecules to be expended on more interesting and stimulating pursuits than reading the boring textbook. I’m not sure anyone’s thinking about whether intellectual muscle is being atrophied. Or worse, not built up at all. Even though I now provide Study Guides for every G-Chem class meeting, I’m very sure that many of my students just use generative AI to run through them. They were happy to tell me how they use AI. Many even felt it helped. I think for many (but not all) of them, it gave them the illusion of learning without the substance. This is likely partly the cause for the growing number of D’s earned – dismal exam performance.

 

Four weeks ago, I surveyed my G-Chem II class about textbook use since we had switched to a new textbook this past academic year. Once again, students were brutally honest about not using or hardly using the textbook, and they were the significant majority. So maybe the inbuilt AI would be an improvement? They might at least read the summaries? But the summaries they read are unlikely to stick, and will be forgotten very soon after. Long-form sustained attention while reading has a higher chance of some knowledge sticking, but only if the students have the staying power to stick with it for a while. All this might be the final death knell of the textbook. Publishers have already anticipated this; the online homework system is what you pay for (because of lazy professors?) and the eTextbook is along for the ride. This is unfortunate, because our present G-Chem textbook is quite good and, in my opinion, quite readable. But that’s coming from someone who grew up reading a lot without a TV at home and certainly pre-internet. (Unlike P-Chem where I ditched the textbook early.)

 

There is a potent larger danger to most of society no longer able to digest a longer, sustained, and more complex explanation or argument. Issues of import will devolve into memes and vibes turning democracy into idiocracy. I shudder at the thought that AI TLDR is taking over and mushing up solid intellectual food into baby paste, but worse, stripped of any underlying nutrition. How depressing.

 

*I first learned the acronym TLDR (Too Long Didn’t Read) over a dozen years ago from a short reply by a younger colleague to a long-form argument I had written in an email to a group working on some curriculum or administrative issue that I no longer remember. It was a rude awakening.