How would Einstein have used ChatGPT?
Our anxiety about this new tool shows how shallow our thinking about human creativity has become.
I have been reading Dennis Overbye’s biography, Einstein in Love, about the great scientist’s youthful years. It’s disturbing to witness how his teachers kept shutting down and rejecting his genius. Only his own persistence and unquenchable curiosity kept him fired up and continuing to learn and explore through books and articles by other innovative thinkers in physics, mathematics and chemistry, his three main areas of interest.
Einstein’s secondary school teachers found young Albert disorderly and undisciplined (because he refused to bend himself to their assigned busywork). His professors found him threatening and cocky (because he refused to keep going over the same well-trodden ground they wanted to rehearse in their classes).
Most heartbreakingly, his mentor at the Zurich Polytechnic, where he got his physics degree, refused to recommend him for a teaching or research job after graduation, and Einstein suspected that this professor was actually blackballing him with other professors in the small circle of German-speaking European physicists.
Einstein got little encouragement from home, either. His father wanted to see young Albert plying a trade, like the electrical engineering work he himself had done; his mother wanted to see her son married to a nice Jewish girl. Albert was close to his mother, but a rift developed when he took up with the Serbian Mileva Maric at the Polytechnic, one of the rare women in those times who had the intellect and the drive to brook convention and go for a PhD in physics and mathematics.
As I read about Einstein’s early life, I am thinking about James Hillman’s insight that human beings are born like acorns, each of us full of the potential to become a towering mature oak tree. It all depends on where we land: our families and social milieux are the ground which will either nurture us to achieve our full height or stunt us forever.
I am always fascinated to see towering trees perched on bare stone, whose roots have managed to hold on tenaciously and snake their way forward to find the earth beneath the rock. Einstein was like that. He seems to have come in with a strong innate sense of his purpose, and the drive to follow his insatiable curiosity wherever it led him. His stubbornness and independence were surely important qualities that served him in his intellectual as well as his personal life.
Two hemlocks on a cliff. Photo by J. Browdy.
A certain amount of adversity is a stimulant to growth. Einstein’s frustrations with his teachers no doubt made him a more creative, nonconformist thinker. But ideally school should be a place that encourages young people’s originality. Certainly now, in these early years of the 21st century, we desperately need new thinking! The same old ways of doing things are so obviously not going to cut it anymore.
So this brings me to ChatGPT, the new AI writing tool. For years AI has been at the cutting edge of scientific exploration, with all the attendant worries about humans creating robots who will come to overpower us. Now we have a “chatbot” that can write as well or better than most humans alive today. Yes, there’s still a lot it doesn’t know and cannot do. But what it can do is amazing.
The arrival of this tool has prompted a lot of anguish among writing teachers and professionals. Is the bot coming for our jobs? Will our students simply plug our essay questions into the bot and turn in the results as their own work?
I think this shows how shallow our thinking about human creativity has become. How could we imagine that a chatbot could replace the deep, mysterious creative source at the heart of the human imagination?
It’s sort of like comparing a paint-by-numbers picture with a Michelangelo. The bot can assemble information and express it clearly in sentences that make sense. But it is only tapping into its databank. It has no connection to the emotional depth of lived experience, or the spiritual depth of the creative insights that come to us spontaneously through imagination, dreams and intuition.
If Einstein had had access to ChatGPT, he might very well have used it to satisfy the busywork demands of his high school teachers. He might even have tried to use it to foil his college professors’ insistence that he memorize and repeat established ideas. This would have freed him up, in terms of time and mental energy, to dig deeper into the creative mysteries he was so ardently exploring on his own.
Rather than trying to police new tools such as ChatGPT, we should encourage students to view them as just another convenience, like the bots that so nicely took over the tedious job of correctly formatting footnotes and bibliographies.
When we make use of the bots for these basic tasks, we have more time and energy left to focus on our primary human task of creative exploration.
When the calculator tool arrived, it did not mean that we stopped teaching kids how to add and subtract. They still need to understand the theory of numbers, of course. In the same way, young people will still need to learn to write, to recognize good writing, and to become “critical thinkers” who can interrogate writing, make productive connections and discern inaccuracies.
That will still have to be part of a basic education. But all that will just be the ground upon with the unique creativity of each human being can flourish.
As teachers, we provide the soil, water and sunlight that encourages our young students to grow. And yes, the “discipline” that provides an essential channel through which, as Thomas Berry recognized, our innate “wildness” or creativity can flow.
When we imagine education as initiation rather than indoctrination, nourishing the young minds of the upcoming generations becomes a sacred responsibility.
As teachers, it’s our duty (and hopefully, our pleasure) to provide stepping stones into the fast-flowing stream of human ingenuity and creative thinking. We can help channel the stream, but we should never block the flow.
Trees on rocks by an exuberant stream. Photo by J. Browdy.
I totally agree with: "Rather than trying to police new tools such as ChatGPT, we should encourage students to view them as just another convenience..." -- and I think the same can be said for the teaching profession. Teachers can use AI tools as a convenience to free up their own bandwidth from content transmission tedium to foster room for relationships, connection, creativity, critical thinking, compassion, collaboration, experiences, emotions, and all the good stuff of education.