I attended the National AI Summit in town yesterday. It was interesting. Half of the presenters were sharing thoughtful, reflective approaches to using AI as a tool to enhance creativity and learning while fostering (protecting? they said “protect” a lot) humanity. The other half were AI cheerleading, evangelism, and/or thinly-veiled sales pitches.
For the more-interesting sessions, there was much talk about the role of anthropomorphism in shaping the experience of interacting with AI tools. It struck me that anthropomorphism is the killer UX that makes AI feel real, like there’s someone on the other side of the chat interface. We see faces on toast, on rock outcroppings on Mars, in clouds (in The Cloud). We see patterns and intent where there isn’t (can’t be), and use that misguided inference to make predictions and fill gaps in our perceptions of the world around us (which, of course, includes the text output of chatbots). So, of course, we apply that to AI tools, and, of course, “this chatbot is real and has human feelings” because it makes keyboard-output that uses the same words that we use to express human experience.
And other presentations included things like “my chatbot said my vibecoded website would have cost like a million dollars and taken 10 years to build and of course I take that as truth without actually questioning it how dare you?” (and the website is basically a Tableau or PowerBI project that could almost certainly have been done without AI, but whatever, who are we to question the all-knowing and all-doing 1000x multiplier of AI?).
The key to this all doesn’t have much to do with AI at all. It involves being clear on our purpose (individually and shared), on why we teach (and learn), on why we support those who teach (and learn). Without that clarity, we will (continue to) have a harder time shifting the conversation from “get on board or be left behind” and toward “how can we enable the deepest, most engaging teaching and learning experiences?”
Anyway. I have several pages of notes to noodle on, but the dichotomy between Humans and 1000x Humans was pretty glaring.
