Earlier this year, I shared my fear that a glitchy chatbot had seized control of a major education research journal. The editors’ torrent of inhuman gibberish made it hard to imagine that real people were still pulling the strings.
Well, recently, I got a worrisome signal that this same shady AI (or one of its cousins) had seized the presidency of the American Education Research Association (AERA), an outfit that bills itself as the world’s largest organization of education researchers. I know this is a bold claim, so I dusted off my modified Turing Test and interrogated the (very) extensive description of the presidential program. By pulling verbatim takes, we’ll try to determine whether the prose reads like the product of humans . . . or glitchy AI. (To quote Dave Barry, “I’m not making this up.” Really.)
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It’s got to be AI, right? The punch-list rambling, disinterest in actual learning, rote invocation of ideological tropes, and fascination with oppression are so tritely optimized that it feels artificial. And yet, reading back through this transcript, it bothers me that I can’t confidently distinguish autopilot AI from earnest edu-babble. Perhaps my AI fears are overblown. After all, I guess it’s possible that this detached unintelligibility and politicized liturgy are just the mundane culmination of what gets practiced daily in ed school corridors and conferences.
Frederick Hess is an executive editor of Education Next and the author of the blog “Old School with Rick Hess.”