Donated school supplies at Eagle Lake Lutheran Church await distribution by Lutheran World Relief. The large background picture of the risen Christ with Mary Magdelene once sat at the back of the chancery of the original 1913 church building.
Shopping at Target recently we carried a list of school supplies printed in our church bulletin: Pencils, pens (non-gel), rectangular erasers, spiral-bound notebooks, crayons. Each fall the congregation donates about 100 school kits to Lutheran World Relief. In 2025 LWR sent nearly 180,000 school kits around the world, including 38 percent to the United States.
With so much news these days about AI, it felt good to be buying “old school” supplies for students. It’s evidence for hope that students will continue to learn using their brainpower. Training the human brain is a process that takes years. Instead, all we hear about these days is training AI. The challenge we face is developing and using AI without losing our own brainpower.
Resistance to using AI is weakening. Early on I maintained that I would use AI only for research, and never for original content. Becoming susceptible to ‘AI creep’, I began asking ChatGPT to summarize my weekly posts. I confess to anticipating the summaries to help me understand what I had written. Did it make sense? Sometimes I use portions of the summaries for promotional blurbs.
Not long ago I started asking Chat for suggested headlines for my posts. I rationalize that by pretending that Chat is serving as a copy editor. At newspapers, the reporter writes the story, and the copy editor writes the headline. While most of the Chat headline suggestions did not meet my standards, occasionally I used some of the wording (like the main headline here).
AI may be a great labor-saving tool, but the cost may be much higher in the long run. Already there is evidence that reading and writing ability, and critical thinking among students are weakening. I attribute this to a shift in the cognitive balance between high involvement and low involvement.
Decades-old research learned in mass communication graduate school described the difference. Reading, where your brain is busy processing symbols (words) into meaning, is high involvement. Viewing or listening to TV or radio is low involvement. You learn and retain more by reading. Today that could be expanded to include digital content on phones and tablets.
It’s hard work
Reading, and more so, writing, is hard work. “After years of studying how humans write, cognitive psychologist Ronald T. Kellogg concluded that drafting a basic persuasive essay was as mentally taxing as digging a ditch was physically exhausting,” reports a story in the New York Times (What do students lose when they stop writing?).
In writing these commentaries, or my past novels, I often tire after about 300 to 500 words. I generally begin the posts on Monday, finish the first draft on Wednesday, and revise and publish on Thursday. (Except next week, when I will be taking the week off, and will be using “postpourri,” a collection of random, brief thoughts and comments.)
The NYT story continues: “Cognitive research confirms that writing is a powerful aid in helping us to retain information we read. For students with still developing minds, the most urgent question, then, is how to protect thinking in a world where it has become so easy to outsource writing. Intellectual growth occurs at every stage, from brainstorming to fine-tuning a final draft. If writing is thinking, then any part of the struggle that is outsourced to technology amounts to relinquishing some freedom to perceive.”
Digital Soma
Our digital fixation and use of AI remind me the drug called “soma” in Aldous Huxley’s 1932 novel, Brave New World. According to study.com, “soma serves as a societal tool for maintaining control. In Brave New World, the World State prioritizes happiness above all else, and soma squashes any negative emotion that could threaten its stability. Rather than confronting their problems, citizens use soma to continue their lives untroubled.”
This may sound a bit conspiracy theory-ish, but the thought occurs that among today’s digital and tech billionaires, some may welcome a digitally drugged populus that is malleable to their control. It would be interesting, perhaps frightening, to hear some of the private discussion among members of Dialog, “a highly exclusive, invitation-only network co-founded by Peter Thiel and investor Auren Hoffman in 2006,” says ChatGPT. Opening the Dialog webpage requires membership access.
Criticism of and concerns about AI are “baffling to tech industry leaders, who see AI rejection as a form of educational malpractice. They point out that writing is already the leading use of AI in the workplace and argue there is no need to continue suffering through the task without help. After all, they say, chatbots now exceed the ability of most humans to produce fluent prose,” continues the NYT article.
“Research shows that traditional, unassisted composition is valuable, not despite its difficulty, but because of it. Writing builds our working memory, executive planning skills and metacognition — the ability to think about our thinking, weigh alternate viewpoints and revise for clarity and style. It takes decades to develop writing skills, from toddlerhood into adulthood.”
‘The devil’s tool’
Recently retired University of Minnesota scholar, Jane Kirtley, goes even further with her concerns about AI: “To me, it’s the devil’s tool. Because of my negative feelings about it, I don’t feel able to train my students in how to use it. I would feel complicit in a plot to undermine so many values that matter to me, like accuracy and critical thinking,” she said in a MinnPost story last May.
“There are just so many things that are problematic about A.I., not to mention its tendency to promulgate misinformation or disinformation,” Kirtley said. “Using it mindlessly is a disaster in the making. It’s a tool. It doesn’t think. It’s not a human being. We shouldn’t expect it to act ethically because it’s not in a position to operate in that way.”
In the past, like ships at sea, libraries, schools and universities, churches, and government agencies, helped individuals travel on a vast sea of information. Today, with AI and digital technology, those ships are weathering a growing storm. We hope to avoid being tossed overboard, left alone to swim among the digital waves and sharks.
Viewing libraries as data centers, they still hold the majority of knowledge and wisdom – The Great Conversation – and they don’t require much energy, except for brain power. The information they hold is curated and credible. Information flowing from data centers is often frivolous anarchy, entertainment, disinformation, and wrong – AI slop. Government and the private sector much collaborate to corral AI before we arrive in a 21st century version of a ‘brave new world’.
