Are We Educating Intellectual Wrestlers? Not with Chat GPT  

Religious institutions of higher education often distinguish themselves from their secular counterparts in terms of something called “purpose.” Sometimes the idea is that the two kinds have different purposes; sometimes it’s that one is purposeful in a way that the other is not (as in the argument that “secular” means trying to be “neutral” between competing purposes, which renders the institution enervated and aimless even as the impossibility of genuine neutrality makes it subservient to unacknowledged aims). I think this distinction is increasingly moot: all colleges and universities, secular or religious, now face the same tech-induced “crisis of purpose,” as Dan Sarofian-Butin put it recently in The Chronicle of Higher Education. 

Sarofian-Butin’s essay on AI and education is a grim read. ChatGPT “collapses the entire process of teaching and learning (thoughtful, recursive, effortful) into an instantaneous, efficient, and polished transaction – no struggle, no iteration, no friction. It creates the perfect performative illusion of teaching and learning.” Higher ed is now “stuck in the kayfabe” – a term from the world of professional wrestling, which everybody knows is not actually wrestling but rather a simulacrum of wrestling designed to entertain. Kayfabe is when everybody knows, but everybody pretends not to know, in order that the show might go on.  

Sarofian-Butin draws on Roland Barthes to make the point clear. Real wrestling is a contest, and the goal is to develop the skills required to win the contest. Barthes observes that by contrast, “the function of the [professional] wrestler is not to win; it is to go exactly through the motions which are expected of him.” In the same way, says Sarofian-Butin, not only the proverbial lazy students and box-ticking administrators but also a demoralized faculty are increasingly just “going through the motions” – putting on the show for the sake of the grade or the paycheck.  

Is it really so bad? On the micro-level of my day-to-day interactions, no. I know many students and not a few colleagues who are just pretending to work, but I also know lots of students and colleagues who are still working. Sarofian-Butin could probably say the same; it’s not all bad. But at the macro level, the level of institutions rather than individuals, I think it’s probably just as broken as he thinks it is. 

Colleges and universities, both secular and religious, are being confronted by a decisive “question concerning technology” (as Heidegger put it) that they should already know how to answer. This particular piece of technology – so-called artificial intelligence – is so obviously subversive of real education that any institution devoted to serving that end should find it easy to draw hard and fast lines. The fact that they do not is a revelation, and in that sense, artificial intelligence is truly “apocalyptic:” it shows us what was already there (and perhaps what we already knew). Only an educational institution that has already lost its purpose would be willing to play along with the pretense that AI can serve that purpose “so long as we use it for good.” If we are able to suspend disbelief, it’s because we’ve already stopped believing.  

When I say that AI is obviously incompatible with any education worthy of the name, which is to say an education that aims to form souls rather than to inform brains, I am not claiming that AI is useless. That would be nonsense. It is very useful if your aim is, for example, to summarize a large amount of text in a few seconds, or scan radiological images for marks of cancer, or create child pornography that involves no actual children and thus counts as “harm reduction.”  

I am only claiming that it is useless, and worse than useless if you aim to educate people. Some readers will respond that education surely involves teaching people how to use important tools and that these programs are such tools, which will become even more important in that new future of work for which we are presumably preparing our students. I offer these readers an analogy. It’s not original to me, but it takes on new clarity and urgency in light of Sarofian-Butin’s wrestling metaphor.  

Why does a wrestler – a real wrestler, not a “professional” – spend a lot of time lifting heavy weights? What is the wrestler’s purpose? One answer is that she needs to move heavy things from one place to another, and so she trains her body until it is strong enough to do that. But that answer is wrong. If the wrestler’s purpose is to move heavy things around, she would do better to get a forklift and learn how to use it. She might then need the services of a forklift-driving school, which would teach her what buttons to push and what levers to pull, and provide her with a certification at the end, which she could show to employers who need to move heavy things around. No, the wrestler’s purpose is to get stronger. That is why she lifts weights. Someone who aims to get stronger should definitely not spend a lot of time driving a forklift. That would almost certainly make her weaker. 

Are we training forklift drivers, or are we training wrestlers? I thought we were training wrestlers. Of course, there are more jobs for forklift drivers than for wrestlers, and while our essential purpose is to educate, we also have a real responsibility to make sure our students can make a living (especially since they have given so much of their future income to us). It’s always been hard to balance these responsibilities in a way that maintains the priority of spiritual formation over job preparation. But the new AI programs decisively force the issue.  

On the one hand, it is in most cases simply not possible for undergraduate students to use these tools without deforming or preventing the formation of their capacities. On the other hand, those capacities are set to become not only less necessary but more of a liability for job-seekers, if indeed there are any jobs left to seek in the bright new future of “free intelligence.”  

But it’s worse than that. After all, there is nothing lesser about being a forklift driver, or training people to drive forklifts. The capacities at issue – the ones that our institutions are supposed to nurture – are not exclusively intellectual capacities. Kayfabe is not a failure of intelligence; those who presume it is, the ones who look around at the cheering audience and shout “Don’t you know it’s all fake!?” are themselves the naive ones (the “marks” in pro wrestling terms). In fact, it may take a great deal of intelligence to keep the show going. Rather, kayfabe is an ethical failing. It’s not an ethical failing in the context of professional wrestling itself, where putting on a show is the whole point. But that’s not the point of a college or a university. In our context, kayfabe is nothing less than a lie. 

If Christian institutions have any advantage in dealing with this crisis of purpose, it will be because they are committed to the claim that human beings are made in the image of God, and that education is for the whole person thus understood. But this commitment is only an advantage if it is coupled with the claim that technologies are no more “neutral” than institutions in their capacities to form and deform image-bearers, and most Christians do not take that claim seriously.