Generative AI is a kind of magic
One of the reasons I think that much of professional education is stagnant, uninspired, and unimaginative is that we don’t allow anyone but the teacher to have any agency. If you doubt this, ask how much control your students have over the learning management system you use in your courses.
I’ve always loved the idea that we’re so attracted to magic (‘real’ magic, not card tricks) because it gives people agency and power. In many of our myths and legends, stories dealing with magic are often about people who are at the bottom of the social hierarchy. They’re the weak, the vulnerable, and the powerless. And magic is what enables them to rise and to succeed.
If magic empowers you to reach further than you thought was possible, then generative AI may be a kind of magic.
I also love thinking about prompts, especially structured prompts, as a kind of spellbook or grimoire. As Ethan Mollick explains:
…companies can develop useful prompts that do serious work and capture them in corporate grimoires, prompt libraries that encode the expertise of their best practices into forms that anyone can use (Ethan Mollick, 2023).
This ties in to the idea of [[code]] as an incantation.
Additional reading
- Mollick, E. (2023). Now is the time for grimoires. One Useful Thing. Retrieved from https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/now-is-the-time-for-grimoires