ChatGPT: Not a Tool, But a Novelty In Search of a Legitimate Use

I am increasingly seeing the ChatGPT creations where a user asks it to generate a drawing or illustrated map of themselves with drawings indicating who they are, based on the "conversations they have been having with the chatbot."

Don't get me wrong, can anything good come from that?

I hope the "conversations" these users have been having with that chatbot has not been too intimate. Silicon Valley has a notorious reputation with what they do with individual personal data. 

Then there's the idea as to why I should care what ChatGPT has to say about me, though I will confess I am not a user, nor will I ever be. But, what credibility does a chatbot have other than what we decide to give it? It's like a bit tech "soothesayer" or horoscope with about the same level of truthfulness.

It's a machine, and it just spitting back to you what you have inputed, and some cases manufacturing that information in order to please the user. Really, it is just a more complex version of Joseph Weizenbaums' chatbot Eliza.

People are searching for ways to use GenAI, in order to give it legitimacy. They want so bad to find some usefulness for it, because it's so neat!

True tools are not like that. They are created to solve a problem, not a solution in search of a problem to solve.

School Leaders Need to Become Data Misers: Make Ed Tech Vendors Justify Every Single Bit of Data They Say They Need

 It is time for schools and school districts to get miserly with their students’ and staffs’ data. 

Don’t share it, ever, with Ed Tech companies and vendors.

If they ask for data, make them justify every single data-point requested and then evaluate their justification. 

If you deem their need for the data as unnecessary, tell them they can’t have it and need to work around it. Period.

If they say their product will not work without that data, tell them to redesign it so that they won’t need it.

School leaders need to be the ones in control of their students’ and staffs’ data, period.

Become a data miser when you work with any companies. 

Bookstore CEO Open to Selling AI-Authored Books: This Reader Not Interested

Recently, Barnes and Noble bookstore CEO says he would sell AI authored books as long as they are transparently labeled as such and if the customer demand is there. (Why CEO of Barnes and Noble Would Support Selling AI-Written Books in Stores)

That makes sense I suppose for a business. The success of AI books in this case will depend on demand. If readers value author-less books, then they can get them. Set aside my own question of why in the world would anyone want to read a book written by a machine.

I think the important thing is the disclosure and transparency regarding authorship. Personally, I am not interested in AI authored books. Part of me just can't get beyond the fact that such work would not be based on the living being's own experience of being human; it would be an assemblage of the experiences of many others and their writings. 

The greater question is whether such AI authored works, such as a novel or book of essays would sell. My purchases are usually tied to authorial reasons. For example, I choose to read a book by historian Lewis Mumford because I enjoy his work, due to the knowledge that he wrote it, it has his style, his ideas, etc.

What for me that is a deal-breaker would be works that are AI authored impersonated works. For example, I would not be interested in a work generated by AI in Lewis Mumford’s style. That to me would require the knowledge that this was not a work that the historian penned himself.

As an avid reader, the notion that bookstores have authorial “knock-offs” on their shelves would not be a place I would frequent. 

The Proper Role of Ed Tech and Educational Leaders in the AI Push into Schools

 “We as educators need to educate our students about AI,” is how Ed Tech’s latest pitch goes regarding their new project. Let’s look at what is really involved in that project.

Paul Kingnorth writes in his 2025 thought-provoking book “Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity”:

“…we need to understand the consequences of the Machine we have built, and which is now rebuilding us so that we may become more perfect consumers, shopping for individual fulfillment in its global marketplace of goods, ideas, and identities.”

The Ed Tech calls for “AI Literacy” are part of the “Machine” project that Kingsnorth describes here, the project of “rebuilding us so that we may become more perfect consumers” of AI, Silicon Valley’s latest money-maker. Big Tech, as it did with the internet, Web 2.0, social media, has once again activated our Ed Tech establishment in schools to take on the task of transforming students and teachers into proper consumers of their latest cash cow, AI.

Part of this project of Big Tech has been to short-circuit any critical thought about AI as they have made it, about its moral and ethical uses, and even whether we should accept it as presented. They did this through their “inevitability” myth, and their “everybody-is-using-it” myth, both of which are not true and does not have to be true.

They have used these myths effectively in the past, and educational technology has been acting and is currently acting as the proselytizers of Silicon Valley since it beginnings as a disciplinary field. It is a discipline that exists to carry out Big Tech’s latest proclamations, and their latest is to get all of education—students, teachers, parents—to acquiesce without protest, to being blind, perfect consumers of AI.

Educators have no business acting in this role. If anything, they should be fostering critical-thinking individualists who decide for themselves the role, if any, AI will play in their own lives and use. These students can also decide for themselves whether acceptance or resistance is called for. The next generation can demand that AI serve humanity, not those who stand to profit the most from its success.

Reflecting back on thirty-plus years in education and my own role in Ed Tech, I have seen how educators become implicated in this whole project of consumer generation. Now, we see how this blind promotion of technology has not really transformed anything for the good.

Past history tells us, that this AI consumer project will not end well in its present form either, without ensuring that our students, teachers, and parents are able to think for themselves critically about the place and form of this technology in their lives. 

We do not have to let Silicon Valley and Ed Tech decide for us.

When Your Inbox of Social Media Feed Is Flooded with AI Consultant Sales Pitches, A Bit of Skepticism Is In Order

I’ve been noticing a flood of AI consultant sales pitches on LinkedIn.

Here is one typical AI consultant's sales pitch to educational leaders: "Students are already using AI. Teachers are already using AI. Therefore, you need help and guidance on establishing control of the situation. I have consulting services to sell you." (The last sentence is mostly unsaid of course.)

First of all, set aside the false "everybody is using AI statements." They have no way of knowing that. They don't know your teachers, your students. Besides, there are certainly both students and teachers not using AI. They are using a huge generalization to try to short-circuit any objections and misgivings you might have about AI and pre-empting discussion about their generalizations. It's the classic set up to "generate a need" for their consulting services and at the same disarm any first layer objections. Call them on their “truth” and you will find no support.

Truth is, these AI consultants-sales people also want to activate within you a bit of “technological-feeling-behindness” and a dose of “inevitability.” If you are behind, something bad is going happen, and if it is inevitable, you can’t do anything about it. Once these are established, you NEED their consulting and services, and if you don’t bad things are going to happen.

Secondly my question is it really education’s job to teach AI use? If they are already using it, then it is apparent they do not need our help with that. If it is to teach everyone how to use AI correctly, then is that really the educational institution’s responsibility? Is it an educator’s job to teach students and teachers how to be “good little consumers of this product”? I think a good argument can be made that the answer is no.

I have to wonder if the real goal behind all this is forcing everyone to accept and use AI. 

Ultimately, I accept that the AI consultant is trying to sell her/his services, but  before any of a school’s very limited budget is spent on these services, remember to question the sales rhetoric and recognize when they use marketing tactics to get you to purchase those services.

There is no urgency that would facilitate the need to spend money just to say you are doing something with AI.

AI Advocates and An Automated Dreamworld: A Fictional World Once Described by Author Kurt Vonnegut

Would you like to see what the world will look like if the AI company CEOs, AI cheerleaders, along with EdTech AI evangelists get the automated world they so desperately desire?

I've been re-reading one of my favorite Kurt Vonnegut novels, Player Piano written in the 1950s. In that book, you have a world where the machines have replaced all the workers, doing the "so-called work that no one really wants to do.

It is a divided world where there are machines, there are engineers and managers, and there is everyone else. The machines do all the work. The engineers design machines for every task, because there is the faith that they can always do it better. 

The managers keep the machines running and the engineers designing. The rest of the people? They take on the left over jobs, such as cleaning the streets; they become members of what is called in the “Reconstruction and Reclamation Corps” or the “Reeks and Wrecks.” They are the people for whom the automated, artificial society no longer had a place for, so they were relegated to the left-over portion of society because they “couldn’t compete with machines.” They even live separately from the machines, managers, engineers in a place called “Homestead” where they can be out of view and only interacted with when needed.

I read the book a few years ago, but now as I re-read, it seems to take on an even greater relevance in the AI arguments of today. It’s almost prophetic!

Vonnegut wrote in his Forward:

“This book is not a book about what is, but a book about what could be,” and I think it a very apt description. 

Player Piano is a book about what could be if humanity continues down a path of pursuing blind efficiency and profit at all costs, and mechanizing and automating everything including their thinking.

Player Piano is what happens when one views everything in the world as a design problem.

The problem with the vision that AI evangelists and promoters have for the future, is that it is a dreamworld, and a world where they thrive at the expense of many others. That’s world that Vonnegut captures in this novel.

There’s all this AI hype about freeing up workers so they can do more important work. But that is nonsense. That is not what will happen. History shows us this, if only they would read it. In this instance, our fiction is becoming our history.

Besides, the reality is, work does not always have to provide us with meaning; we can find meaning in our work, no matter what it is.

And then there is the dreamy idea a so-called “Universal Minimum Income.” That’s really nonsense. (Actually Vonnegut has such a feature in this society, and it does not wokr.) But it will not happen, ever, in a society such as ours. In our current society, we are constantly cutting food stamps, medicaid and all manner of services for those in need, and we expect our government is going to provide a universal income for everyone regardless of what they do? That is biggest nonsensical idea ever!

I am so glad to be revisiting the world of Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano now, because it offers a clearer picture than ever, where this blind, religious faith in AI is going to take us. It is not a “Promise land of abundant milk and honey flowing" either.

I’m sure Vonnegut would have a big laugh at the thought of him being a prophet because that would be nonsense to him. But, his world in Player Piano and the beliefs that underpin it, are very much alive in the hearts and minds of AI dreamers. 

Booing AI-Promoting CEOs and AI Evangelists: Perfect Opportunity for True AI Literacy

When a CEO in a commencement speech tells a group of young people "To Deal with it!" over their boos about the mention of AI, these words seem to be echoes of the voices of manufacturers telling the Luddites the same thing when machines were installed to replace them in the factories of the 19th century.

This time, Big Tech, our government leaders, and Ed Tech establishment are relentlessly trying to instill into students the "inevitability" of AI and their need to quietly acquiesce to its replacing them in the workplace.

Amazingly, while so many have bought in to the inevitability myth, there are still young people who have the clarity of mind to see through the myths that have been constructed around AI specifically. 

This questioning of AI’s rightful place in our world is a perfect opportunity for educators to foster, not passive consumer sentiments over the tech, but to empower students to question, to be critical, and to be in charge of AI’s place in the future.

Undoubtedly, people like this CEO does not want that. CEOs want to the power and the ability to replace humanity at will for power and profit.

Ed Tech had an opportunity to curtail the narrative that AI is inevitable, but it chooses instead to propagate the narrative.

But that narrative is a lie. The AI that is being created is not the AI we have to accept and adapt our lives to.

Despite what the myth says, AI isn't taking over anything. What is happening, CEOs and business leaders and even educators are making the conscious decision to replace humans for the sake of their own power and profit. It is that simple. They are making a conscious, ethical decision.

Because it is  choice, made by human beings, it is also choice in how AI happens and a choice in what we allow it do. That is where AI literacy should be. We should be giving students all the knowledge and empower them with the choice.

Despite how it is spun by the AI pundits, commencement speech boos are not about fears and misunderstandings of AI; it is a sign that there are still individuals who are thinking for themselves, and that is what education should be about, not fabricating “good little consumers of AI.”

As educators, we should be arming students with critical thought that attacks the inevitability myth and other marketing myths of AI that can counter and help students decide their own future with or without AI.

There is a space yet for Luddite thinking when it comes to AI, and it is time to start booing the CEOs and prophets who are making these claims of inevitability.