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. (Donât worry about where the robot came from, itâs just an analogy, itâs 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 trainerâs insistence that doing the work yourself is better for you might sound like, and share some rhetoric with, arguments about the âdignity of toilâ, 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 â i.e., âwork is good for youâ sounds like something that would come from the rhetorical milieu of protestant-work-ethic preaching, which isnât a tradition they particularly want to be associated with, but in this case itâs just factually true.
Whether having the robot do things is compatible with your moral & ethical views doesnât matter â thatâs a whole separate argument, take it up with your local philosopher / theologian / whatever. Whether the robot can lift heavier weights than you doesnât matter â 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 didnât 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 âAIâ 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, âdoing the work yourself is good because it facilitates self-improvementâ is easy to misinterpret as âdignity of toilâ stuff, and to students who have become used to using âAIâ for tasks, instructors trying to convince them of this argument end up sounding like this:
(Thereâs a âCalvinismâ joke here somewhere.)
(Yes I know thatâs where the characterâs name comes from in the first place.)
Now, one could argue that the REAL problem is that the students arenât coming to class with the goal of improving mental skills the way you go to a fitness class to improve physical skillsâ 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 âAIâ really IS more analogous to Calvinâs snowblower. But tackling that means confronting much larger structural problemsâ 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 âokay, MY goal is for the students in my classroom to actually learn something while theyâre here, and thereâs not really a way to accommodate the preferences of the students who are taking up a seat but DONâT want to learn anything, so Iâll just have to convince them to try & learn anyway, using the tools that are available to me.â And at the moment, this is producing the current discourse around âAIâ in the classroom & âAI detectorsâ & everything else.
