Jacques Ellul, AI, and Teaching

I made a classic mistake this week: I decided to start a 300 page book. It was impossible that I would finish it before the semester started to gain momentum and the waning days of my summer research and writing time would brusquely push aside any time (or honestly motivation) to read a book.

So, I can’t imagine finishing Nolen Gertz’s Nihilism and Technology(2nd Editing, 2024), and this is not because I’m not enjoying it and learning from it. I did, however, find time to read Gertz’s recent-ish piece in Commonweal on Jacques Ellul and AI. (Artificial Intelligence, not Allen Iverson, although that would be awesome). The piece is short enough and good enough that it’s worth just reading. I’ve used Ellul’s ideas in some of my writing in the past. 

The one thing that I took away from Gertz’s (and Ellul’s) argument is that using AI for writing assumes that the inefficiency in writing is a bug rather than a feature. This follows Ellul’s arguments that technology (and more broadly “techne”) has created and perpetuates the privileging of efficiency (and scalability) above and beyond all other goals. Ultimately, efficiency becomes a goal of its own and inefficient processes tend to attract technological solutions. Writing, which is inefficient for many reasons, was a natural fit for technology that aimed at producing greater efficiency. The recent growth of Large Language Model driven AI is hardly surprising. After all, who has the energy, time, and bandwidth, to write the dozens of cursory email that academics write every day?

That said, the reality is that most of my writing isn’t about producing a finished product (efficiently or otherwise). A quick read of this blog makes clear that my capacity to proofread, edit for style, and even articulate myself clearly remains a work in progress. I’ve started to write a few times a week in a notebook to create space for even more provisional writing, stuff that wouldn’t even necessarily have a place in a blog post.

Writing, then, for me is about thinking. It’s about process. And it’s about discipline. 

These are processes that resist efficiency in profound ways. There is no shortcut to the practice of writing 1000 words a day. You just have to do it. There is process to putting together thoughts in an orderly way on a consistent basis other than doing it over and over. And there is no short cut to the benefits that come from writing consistently which range from writing more easily (or at least enjoying writing more) to thinking more clearly (you’ll just have to trust me here!).

For my students, almost all of the writing that we do (99.9% of it) is provisional. None of the ideas that we articulate in class and in papers are meant to be the final word on any topic. What writing is meant to do is help students sharpen their thinking process. The same way reading helps students become better readers. Practicing an instrument helps a musician become a better player.

To circle back to Ellul, then, our job as historians (or as scholars in the humanities more broadly) is to make the argument that what we do and our students do isn’t an inefficient process grounded in antediluvian habits or values, but rather an integral part of the development of historical (and broadly humanistic) thinking. In other words, it’s a vital part of learning to think. 

It might be conspiratorial to observe that thinking is an inefficient process in and of itself. Most animals react more efficiently when they don’t need engage in thought and just react whether through instinct or training. (To be clear, I recognize that a trained or conditioned response does require some thought, but it’s not what we’d recognize as conscious thought.) That said, the inefficiency of thinking is what allow us to understand difficult questions, to address challenging problems, and to exercise discernment. AI for all its glibness with language has not proven particularly adept at framing or even answering difficult problems. And when it has produced valuable new insights, this is largely driven by human inputs. In other words, humans have done the work to formulate the questions, which reflects the capacity of human thinking to search for meaning and order in the world. 

Fortunately, most of my classes privileges the ability of writing to help us not only frame questions but to attempt to answer them. Since this is not the domain of AI — yet, and perhaps ever — it remains fairly easy to explain to my students why it is not a viable substitute for the challenging and inefficient work of writing in my class.