This may be the strangest opening to a post about the destructive use of generative AI that you have read.
I am in the presence of the dead and dying regularly. I work part-time as an aged-care chaplain, providing spiritual care to those in the very last season of life. Numerically speaking, the facility I work at experiences 30 to 40 deaths per year. Chaplains often facilitate particular end-of-life requests, but most often chaplains exist to be companions to those left behind – family, friends, and staff.
Telling meaningful stories about the deceased is a practice that helps us grieve. It is not uncommon to tell stories using items from the resident’s room, or with the aid of artefacts that others have in their possession. These letters and photos often bring the presence of the deceased back into the present moment. This all assists in meaning-making, grieving and healing.
It must be said, while all the stories are being told through writing and photographs, everyone sincerely recognises that there is now a permanent distance between the deceased person’s ‘living presence’ and the present moment. This permanent distance is a normal marker of loss, but these artefacts can all help bridge that felt gap and remain connected.
This felt distance between a document and the moment it was documented (or captured) is a phenomena we all live with, and not only among the dead. Practically all photos and writing hold relational symbolic connection to things no longer present. For example, a quick scroll through the photos on my phone can bring a flood of past moments back into the present. A browse through the handwritten letters I posted to Natalie in my teens, tells a story of ‘us’ and ‘then’ that we can trust and rely on. (Yes, we did distance dating in the 90’s via the post.)
Again, our relationship with writing matters, and has for millennia. Philosopher and essayist Walter Benjamin referred to writing as having a kind of afterlife (fortleben). On literature, Maurice Blanchot suggested that writing opens a unique dimension that serves as a kind of bridge between places. Plato critiqued writing as not being able to answer questions or adjust for audiences when compared to live animated dialogue, but nonetheless said that writing served a purpose in preservation and in transmitting ideas. Writing then, is a kind of acceptable and reliable ‘dead speech’ we have lived with for thousands of years.
“David, what do the letters and photos of the dead (or the living) have to do with the use of generative AI in writing or image creation today?“
Imagine for a moment that somebody you know passes away quite suddenly. In their room, or on their computer, you find letters, emails, drawings, photos that they have written and captured. Naturally, these artefacts may help you to reconstruct stories about them and give you a sense of who they were. However, imagine many of these letters and images have all been created, modified, or enhanced using AI tools like ChatGPT. With the artefacts synthetically altered, the distance between the present moment and the person who is dead is no longer a matter of time or presence; it is now distanced from reality itself. In this case, you can no longer tell or reconstruct a reliable story about the person, or the subjective moments that have passed. Why? Because the machine has warped the truth. The written word no longer points to what was once living. The machine has taken relatable dead speech and made it unrelatable synthetic speech.
Here is the rub, for me: When generative AI is involved in the creation of artefacts I can no longer reliably relate to the past, or the person representing a passed moment, with the same sense of interpersonal integrity that I have been accustomed to. And rightly or wrongly, from a point of personhood, faith, and spirituality, I feel somewhat grieved I no longer live in a world of unadulterated dead speech. I want writing to come from people, not machines. I want human-made dead speech in my social feed, my books, my novels, my emails, my SMSs, my news, my love letters, my poetry, my papers, and – controversially – in my assignments. I want it more than speed, accuracy, fluency, flawlessness, flow or correct answers.
Now, I acknowledge this intersection between the deceased and the disruption that generative AI has brought to writing may seem extreme or reductive. I also acknowledge some AI fanatics may believe I am catastrophising the situation or being classically logocentric. However, in my experience as a spiritual care provider who has also authored several books, is completing a PhD, and works as a casual tutor/marker at my local University, I believe the inclusion (and encouraged use) of generative AI in writing, thinking, synthesising, recalling, referencing, searching, and image creation is having a collective human impact on a psycho-spiritual interpersonal level. And if you don’t feel a sense of loss now, I imagine that one day you and/or those around you will.
Within higher education, I think it is worth considering the cost of forsaking relational integrity for a kind of synthetic integrity that is currently allowed, encouraged, and/or overlooked in some learning institutions. Now, I’m not advocating for a complete ban of generative AI use, but when it comes to policies and practice around the creation and submission of the written word, I think we must also consider the relational consequences. Call me old-fashioned but the relationships I had with teachers and tutors – from pre-school to my current doctoral supervisors – have had a significant impact on my personhood, learning, and relationship to education. This accounts for both positive and negative experiences.
Research overwhelmingly points towards the impact of student-teacher relationships. Generative AI fractures this relationship, especially when assessing and reviewing written work within asynchronous distance education because we are all meaning-making through what has traditionally been relatable and translatable dead speech. Today, when I see student’s written work that is largely AI generated, I know they are academically ‘cheating’, but it is more than that. I the reader, feel cheated. Cheated of a chance to know the author. Cheated of the chance of making a connection. Cheated of trust. Cheated of personhood.
Some people are suggesting that in this ‘era of AI’ written assignments need rethinking, are obsolete, old-fashioned, and don’t work in accurately assessing learning. I respect that this is a nuanced and contextual argument but those who’ve spent time demonstrating learning through writing (minus genAI) will bear witness to its unapologetic ability to expose our own lack of thinking, knowledge, skills, and ability to clearly communicate learning. Like other assessment types, writing an assignment also demonstrates a person’s ability to follow directions and possibly repeat the learning/writing task, albeit a little more difficult next time.
To summarise this novel connection between dead aged care residents and active students; in lieu of live dialogue, the use of generative AI in the ‘dead speech of writing’ creates a dishonest distance that makes it difficult for teachers to assess what it was like to be with that student the moment they were writing their assignment. In the same way that an old love letter written to a surviving partner gives a relational account of one’s love for another, I believe teachers, tutors, and assessors should be granted an undisturbed, unaltered, interpersonal account of someone’s relationship to the learning material in a moment of time, without question, doubt, or psycho-spiritual splintering.
Long live dead speech.
David Tensen
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