Exactly. OP clarified that they are an educator, and in the context of education, the analogy to physical labor is more like this:
Say you enroll in a fitness class, and you show up with a robot in tow. (Donāt worry about where the robot came from, itās just an analogy, itās not relevant.) Then, when the fitness trainer instructs the class to do an exercise, you turn to the robot and tell it to do the exercise for you. The trainer objects to this.
Is the issue a spiritual one? No. Though the trainerās insistence that doing the work yourself is better for you might sound like, and share some rhetoric with, arguments about the ādignity of toilā, it is in fact literally true that you will benefit from doing the task yourself in a way that you will NOT benefit if the robot does it for you.
I believe that rhetorical overlap is what OP was expressing frustration with ā i.e., āwork is good for youā sounds like something that would come from the rhetorical milieu of protestant-work-ethic preaching, which isnāt a tradition they particularly want to be associated with, but in this case itās just factually true.
Whether having the robot do things is compatible with your moral & ethical views doesnāt matter ā thatās a whole separate argument, take it up with your local philosopher / theologian / whatever. Whether the robot can lift heavier weights than you doesnāt matter ā the goal of the exercise is not for the weights to have been moved, the weights are not in & of themselves significant and are present only to facilitate the exercise.
At the end of the day, the issue is that the purpose of being in that room was to improve your physical fitness and you didnāt do that. You have gained nothing from this. All that you have accomplished is to annoy the person running the fitness class, and to take up a spot that could have been occupied by someone who was actually interested in what the class was for.
This is why āAIā in education is a problem, AND why the rhetorical overlap described by OP is a problem. The point of asking students to write an essay is not that we want to read essays, any more than the point of the trainer asking you to lift weights is that she wants the weights to be moved to a different position. The point is that writing the essay is a mental exercise, the same way lifting the weights is a physical one. But because of this rhetorical overlap, ādoing the work yourself is good because it facilitates self-improvementā is easy to misinterpret as ādignity of toilā stuff, and to students who have become used to using āAIā for tasks, instructors trying to convince them of this argument end up sounding like this:
(Thereās a āCalvinismā joke here somewhere.)
(Yes I know thatās where the characterās name comes from in the first place.)
Now, one could argue that the REAL problem is that the students arenāt coming to class with the goal of improving mental skills the way you go to a fitness class to improve physical skillsā that actually their goal is a degree, and they really can achieve that goal just fine without writing their own essays, so to them the āAIā really IS more analogous to Calvinās snowblower. But tackling that means confronting much larger structural problemsā career advancement often being gated behind degrees, widespread perception of schooling as being primarily a stepping-stone for professional/financial success, cultural trends of anti-intellectualism & devaluation of learning-for-its-own-sake, etc., etc., and we as educators are not empowered to fix these things. What we CAN do is say āokay, MY goal is for the students in my classroom to actually learn something while theyāre here, and thereās not really a way to accommodate the preferences of the students who are taking up a seat but DONāT want to learn anything, so Iāll just have to convince them to try & learn anyway, using the tools that are available to me.ā And at the moment, this is producing the current discourse around āAIā in the classroom & āAI detectorsā & everything else.
