Co-missioners,
With school resuming this month in the northern hemisphere, Carol Braun explores a pressing issue that she and teachers around the world are suddenly wrestling with these days. Carol, of course, approaches this from her Crossings perspective, inviting all of us to notice how Christ’s benefits are absolutely of use to her and whoever else dares to trust him as they continue to serve their students.
Peace and Joy,
The Crossings Community
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On Patches, Wineskins, and Online Teaching in the Age of Generative AI
by Carol Braun
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In late August, the New York Times Opinion section ran a writing contest that pitted a human author—the novelist Curtis Sittenfeld—against the generative artificial intelligence of ChatGPT, with the Times’s readers as the judges. Ms. Sittenfeld and the chatbot received the same prompt: to produce a thousand-word beach read in the style of Ms. Sittenfeld’s published work, and to incorporate a list of requested elements (flip-flops, middle age, kissing, etc.) into the story.
If you’d like to judge the results for yourself, you can find the two pieces of writing here, one after the other, with the authorship revealed in a coda at the end. (Be warned: I’m soon going to tell you which is which.)
Having spent much of my summer thinking—obsessing, really—about generative artificial intelligence, I couldn’t resist reading the two stories as soon as I learned the premise of the contest. What happened next fed right into my summer’s obsession.
As I read the first sentence of the first story, I tripped on some roundabout syntax and recognized the set-up for a predictable romantic comedy. I immediately suspected I was in the hands of ChatGPT. As I read on, I found confirmation: a cutesy multihyphenate modifier here (clever, I thought, but likely cribbed from examples in frothy chick lit); an unnatural-seeming detail there (rickety benches at a concert pavilion, really?). The story was wildly impressive for something made by a machine. But as a piece of art it felt hollow, all the way to its syrupy final lines.
As I moved on to the second story, I immediately felt in better hands. The sentences felt more solid and satisfying. The main character’s past felt richer. Some details were a bit baffling. (How does the name “Java Junction” constitute an “ironic nod” to a café’s nondescript location?) But we’ve all encountered confusing bits of other people’s writing, and I took them as I usually do: as invitations to wrap my mind around them, wring sense from them, and thus get a little kick out of seeing the world from a slightly alien perspective. All told, the second story also struck me as trite and not my bag, with an ending just as syrupy as the first one. At a few points I even wondered if I’d gotten the authorship wrong, but on the whole I thought probably I hadn’t.
Well, dear reader, I had gotten it wrong. In her coda at the end of the piece, Sittenfeld reveals how she’d carefully researched some of the details in the first story that I’d been quick to brush off as offkey mimicry of quirky concreteness. After the reveal, I noticed how the second story’s dialogue was summarized rather than particularized—a fact I might have taken as a sign of its automation. I stepped away from the experiment with a bad taste in my mouth, because I’d confirmed exactly the worry I’d been building up for myself over the preceding months: that AI is getting shockingly good at producing human-like text and, more troublingly, that when I’m primed to suspect AI authorship I become an uncharitable and closed-minded reader.
My worry has less to do with literary experiences of reading than with my current vocation as an online math teacher. Since ChatGPT debuted in the middle of the ’22-’23 school year, I’ve gone from blithe denial of any real change to an increasingly concerned realization that lots of things have changed in ways that I’ve felt at a loss to accommodate.
By last spring, when I encountered long, corporate-sounding submissions from my students, my attitude was strikingly similar to the one I applied to Sittenfeld’s story. I graded tests with a suspicious eye, wondering if a smuggled phone had produced some of the solutions I was reading. When a student I knew well submitted a response to a classmate’s project that didn’t sound like him, I asked him whether he had used AI. He patiently explained that he had pasted the classmate’s project into an AI, asked the AI to summarize it, then wrote his own response to the summary, and finally used another AI to clean up his response. In doing so, he hadn’t broken any of my explicit rules for the assignment. My rules were written for a bygone era.
I spent much of this summer revising my classes in an attempt to fit them better to our new reality. It didn’t help my mood that my online school has decided to eliminate proctored testing at what seemed to me precisely the wrong moment, when cheating has become easier than ever to do and harder than ever to detect. There I sat, staring at tests and quizzes that my students would now take entirely on their honor, trying to imagine ways I could rethink them to discourage or counter the use of AI. And this in the face of endless news about how the tech is getting better and better.
In the end, I made lots of changes to the structure of my courses and the types of assessments I give, and I’m hopeful that the changes will play out well. But, as the new school year begins, I’m still getting swoops of panic in the pit of my stomach, feeling that the ground has shifted out from under me in a job to which I’d grown comfortably adapted.
From Wikimedia Commons
I sometimes got the sense this summer that I was trying to apply old tools to solve problems of a new age—trying, for example, to rewrite questions to make them harder for an AI to interpret—in ways that simultaneously made the old thing worse and failed to adapt successfully to the new. As I started to gather my thoughts for this this essay, I was reminded of the two images that Jesus uses at Mark 2:21-22: the new patch sewn onto old cloth, and the new wine put into old wineskins. Those illustrations have long puzzled me, in ways I’ll try to unravel now.
To recall the context: earlier chapter 2, Jesus has called Levi directly out of his tax booth, just as the other disciples were called directly off of their boats in chapter 1. Jesus then goes straight to Levi’s house to recline at his table with tax collectors and sinners. In that setting, the scribes of the Pharisees ask his disciples why he would dine with such people. Jesus, overhearing, replies at verse 17, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick; I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.” This answer strikes me as impolitic. He seems to be saying, rather pointedly, I came to call not you, the righteous, but these other people here that you’re looking down on. The scribes’ question was about the tax collectors and sinners, but Jesus’ answer looks first at the questioners themselves.
Then at verse 18 we’re told that John’s disciples and the Pharisees are fasting, and people (the same people as at verse 16? or just people in a similar frame of mind?) ask Jesus why his disciples aren’t fasting too. Jesus first gives his answer about the wedding guests not fasting while the bridegroom is with them, with the little preview of his death when the bridegroom will be taken away. Then he pivots to the pair of images I’ve been chewing on:
Verse 21: “No one sews a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old cloak; otherwise, the patch pulls away from it, the new from the old, and a worse tear is made.”
Verse 22: “And no one puts new wine into old wineskins; otherwise, the wine will burst the skins, and the wine is lost, and so are the skins.”
Jesus’ answers again seem to entail a wry shift of focus. The questioners have asked, “Why aren’t your people fasting? Why aren’t they following our good old rules for getting right with God?” Jesus answers that no one would sew a new patch onto a tear in an old garment. In this analogy, what is the new patch, and what is the old garment?
In the question, the old thing was the old path to righteousness: fasting. But fasting seems more like a patch than a garment: an old, well-tried solution to the problem of a frayed relationship with God. On this view, the new patch is Jesus, who embodies an entirely new way of solving that problem. And the old garment might then be the people who are clinging to the old rules and methods—that is, the questioners themselves. Whereas the questioners asked why those people aren’t using our methods for staying on the straight and narrow, Jesus’ answer seems first to explain why the questioners, or people in the questioners’ frame of mind, aren’t the ones for whom his radical new ways are intended. If you’re clinging to those old rules, he seems to say, then you’re better off sticking to your old ways, because my new ways will just end up doing you more harm than good.
Similarly with the wineskins: if Jesus is the new wine, then he seems to be telling the questioners that he came not to fill them up, but to fill up the ones who are kicked to the side by the old rules and methods. If you’re stuck on those old ways, he seems to say, then my good news isn’t for you; you wouldn’t be able to handle it. It would be wasted on you, and you’d end up worse off.
We aren’t told here how the questioners react. But this exchange is followed by two similar interactions about the rules of the Sabbath, and there we do see the reaction: “The Pharisees went out and immediately conspired with the Herodians against him, how to destroy him.”
Extreme, yes, but also understandable, given Jesus’ message. The scribes and Pharisees and their ilk in Mark are deeply attached to the rules they’ve been following all their lives to keep in good standing with God. Then along comes Jesus, flouting those rules: keeping bad company, not fasting on the right days, doing what’s unlawful on the Sabbath. No doubt they would have liked to dismiss him, but he seems unignorable. He teaches like one having authority—like an author, not merely a scribe. He forgives sins on earth like he’s speaking for God himself. He goes around mending and healing and casting out demons. If Jesus is right and the old rules aren’t needed to stay on God’s good side, where does that leave them? If God isn’t interested in those external signs and practices when judging who is righteous and who isn’t, then he must be looking deeper, into their minds and hearts—far more unruly parts of them than the surface they polish to show the world. If God is looking inside, then they, and we, have reason to be very worried. A God who looks inside can’t possibly be pleased. Better to get out ahead of it, to go on the offensive against God if that’s how it’s going to be.
This brings me back to my own predicament, as one clinging to my old rules and ways, on a far smaller scale, in my work of online teaching. The queasy distrustfulness that overshadowed my work at the end of last year; the dread and disorientation I felt this summer; the bitterness I self-righteously nursed over the new rule to get rid of proctoring—all this sprang from my suddenly seeing the fragility of a system in which I’d grown comfortable, and not wanting to let that system go because I wasn’t sure where I’d be left without it.
Jesus came to call not the righteous but sinners. He came to heal not those who are whole in themselves but those who are sick, broken, torn, in need of mending. The moment when the scribes and Pharisees feel the ground give way under their feet, when they’re no longer secure in their own righteousness—that’s the moment when Jesus’ good news is aimed right at them. His new patch can patch us up; his new wine can fill us. His righteousness is good enough for us all, and his dying and rising secures us a place of good standing in God’s eyes that we know we could never win on our own.
This message is a rod of support as I step into this new school year. Remembering it, I can breathe a little more, panic a little less, make a little more space for charity and open conversation when I read my students’ work or the next plan of action from my administrators. Filled up with Christ, I can get back to focusing on what has always made my job meaningful: working for the sake of my students, even now as we navigate this new age together.
