Serious People vs. Harmful Robots
What follows is a speech I gave to the high school students and faculty of during Chapel, 24 September 2024.
My name is Nick Cherone, and I am the Upper School Dean of Instruction here at AACS. My job is to lead the faculty in helping students learn, and I am deeply committed to your learning and my own personal and professional learning. I have taught at AACS for fourteen years — classes like Music Appreciation, Symphonic Band, Percussion Ensemble, Worldviews in Film, Music Theory, and AP Music Theory. For the majority of my tenure here, I was the Fine Arts Director, leading the school’s curricular and co-curricular fine and performing arts programs. In that role I was also the theatre teacher, directing the fall play, spring musical, and summer play, and teaching Drama and Honors Dramatis. While shepherding that program, I was blessed to have 21% of the student body participating in the Drama Club — that’s one in five. I still teach Honors Dramatis, an award-winning 10-member advanced acting ensemble class. I also am one of the 6-person Senior Practicum team, led by Ms. Etherton. Five years ago, I was surprised to be named the central Maryland high school educator of the year. I really do believe in the value of learning: I have two master’s degrees, the most recent of which is in School Leadership. I continually learn about my content area as an active volunteer and professional actor and director in Baltimore City. If you believe athletics and fitness are more important than any of that: I was the captain of my school’s varsity soccer team, and we won the state championship three out of the four years I was on the team. Obviously I haven’t been playing much recently, but I’m working to learn sustainable routines to stay physically healthy as an adult. I believe people who are lifelong learners are “serious people,” but even serious people benefit from a sense of humor — thus the walkup music.
Last week, I ran into another serious person, Maya Elliott, sitting on the Kerr patio after school. She was productively struggling through her English homework, and she invited me to bounce around some ideas for an essay she was creating. In that conversation, Maya reminded me that, according to Plato, all learning is remembering. And I remembered that Jack Nebbia’s uncle — who is also my dear friend, former colleague, and fellow serious person — often spoke in Chapel during the years he taught English at AACS. Jack’s Uncle Eric usually started his Chapel speeches by saying that he was here to remind us of things we already know.
So, in the style of Plato or Jack Nebbia’s Uncle Eric, I’m here to remind you of something you already know:
You are infinitely more valuable than a robot.
“Valuable” is a tricky word because it often gets confused with “enjoyable.” Sometimes, the same thing can be both valuable and enjoyable. Like a snow day:
Snow days are valuable because they provide an unplanned opportunity to rest; they are enjoyable because they enable snowball fights, hours of uninterrupted video gaming with friends, and cozy fireside tea-drinking, among other things.
But these two words aren’t always compatible.
Chapel, for instance, is always valuable, but it isn’t always enjoyable. But, as you already know: Just because you don’t always enjoy Chapel doesn’t mean it isn’t valuable. And when you make a choice to reject or ignore what is valuable because it doesn’t entertain you, you are a fool. Or, in the words of my favorite television villain:
I’ve done my best to make this speech valuable, because, as you remember,
You really are infinitely more valuable than a robot.
Even this robot:
To be clear, when I say robots, I mean smartphones, algorithms, large language models, and other forms of artificial intelligence. These robots have improved my life in many ways, and I don’t think any of them are inherently evil. The robots are tools. They can be used redemptively in many very human ways that build the Kingdom of God on earth. Here are a few examples from my life:
I stay connected with my parents and my sister, who all live in Wisconsin.
I stay organized and efficient, which has made it possible for me to have a lot of space and flexibility in my day for face-to-face interactions with colleagues and students, and also for hanging out with friends and engaging in activities that bring me joy.
I quickly access information like maps, websites, statistics, and research when the need arises.
I cause joy and laughter by sending videos or memes that make me laugh to friends who will get the joke.
I brainstorm complex ideas using chatbots as a thought partners.
I listen to audiobooks every morning and learn healthy, research-based strategies for healing anxiety, depression, trauma, injustice, and relational complexities.
Jesus came to liberate us, heal us, and give us abundant life.
And the work of the Church is to continue the work of Jesus — liberating, healing, and cultivating abundant living until Jesus returns and brings his Kingdom into fullness. And it turns out that robots are helpful tools when employed toward ends that are good, right, and true.
That said, we all know that robots are often employed toward other, harmful ends. They are used to manipulate people by exploiting algorithms that are intentionally designed to be addictive using what scientists know about human behavior and psychology. They are also used — usually unconsciously — to numb pain through the same brain chemistry mechanisms as opiates and other addictive substances. And they enable people to fake complex, creative tasks like writing because the robots can now replicate evidence of creative processes without requiring any actual human creativity.
These harmful ends seem to be too consequential to ignore, particularly for you. But I’m just reminding you of something you already know. In a book published earlier this year, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt wrote in his 2024 book The Anxious Generation that your generation, “became the first generation in history to go through puberty with a portal in [your] pockets that [calls you] them away from the people nearby and into an alternative universe that [is] exciting, addictive, [and] unstable.” And, according to Haidt, this means you were essentially, “test subjects for a radical new way of growing up.”
Remember all the debates in 2020 about whether or not we had enough data to be certain whether COVID vaccines were safe? At least those vaccines went through multi-phase, double-blind, clinical research trials. Smartphones did not. AI has not. And yet our society gave them to children.
Both cocaine and opium were used by doctors as medicine in the past, but now we know they are addictive and harmful, so we don’t give them to children, and we are still figuring out how to harness the benefits for adults, but the opioid epidemic suggests we haven’t figured that out, either.
According to psychologist Jean Twenge in her 2023 book Generations (citing research from the ongoing Monitoring the Future study, which annually surveys more than 25,000 8th, 10th, and 12th grade students), “Smartphone ownership in the U.S. … crossed 50% at the end of 2012 into the beginning of 2013. This was also around the time that social media use among teens went from optional to virtually mandatory — in 2009, only about half of teens used social media every day, but by 2012, 3 out of 4 did.” We all know that more than 3 out of 4 of us use social media in 2024.
Let’s just look at how things have changed for teenagers since 2012:
And it’s not just our country.
ChatGPT was publicly released less than two years ago. I believe I am justified in my hunch that we should probably restrict student use of generative AI until we have a better understanding of how it impacts human beings.
Because I’m a serious person.
I’m fighting back against the robots. This is not because I think the robots are evil. This is why:
Surrendering our humanity for the sake of enjoyment or convenience is foolish.
I have a confession: I recently used ChatGPT to help me finish a small writing project. I teach an advanced acting class here called Honors Dramatis,
and we are preparing to attend the . I needed to send the Festival a short synopsis of our one-act competition piece, which is an abridgement of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Here’s what I asked and what I was provided:
And here’s how I responded to refine the output:
And here’s what I ultimately submitted to the Festival:
One of my job responsibilities at AACS is to respond to instances of academic dishonesty. So, I’m fairly well versed in the AI detection and investigation tools available. Let’s be clear: what I did was not dishonest. I was asked to send a synopsis, which is usually included on the back cover of a published play. I used a tool to create the synopsis for a play that is so old, it isn’t covered by U.S. copyright law. That said, I got curious and input “my” synopsis into an AI detector to see what the results would be. Here’s what the most basic kind of detector said:
This might have you thinking: If Mr. Cherone used AI to write that synopsis, I should be able to use it to write my essay for school. You are, of course, wrong.
There’s a difference between product and process. I needed a product — a synopsis of a more than four-hundred-year-old play that is in the public domain. I used my critically-thinking brain to expedite the creation of that product using a generative AI tool. I refined the results using a follow-up prompt that I created after thinking critically about the first output I was given. Then, I thoughtfully edited the second output, revised it, reworked the order and syntax, and added a fun closing sentence. So, the product was largely constructed out of text generated by AI, but the process required my creative and critical brain. And that only worked because I’d read the entire play dozens of times, created my own original abridgement of the play, and had a clear sense of what I wanted the synopsis to communicate. The process was human.
When you are assigned homework like writing an essay for school, your teacher is interested in your process. Do you really think Mr. Pfenson wants to read 100 essays about The Odyssey for the sake of reading about The Odyssey? He already read it. And wrote about it. And read what people much smarter than any of us have written about it. Mr. Pfenson and I and all the rest of your teachers don’t care about the product, we care about the product as evidence of your engagement with the process. We want to know how well you can read and understand complex texts, synthesize ideas, create original arguments, communicate with clarity and precision, artfully construct language, and present a finished product with professional polish. We want to know this so that we can give you feedback to help you get better at it. Because communicating with other people is one of the most important and difficult things human beings have to do. And frankly, it’s because we love you, and we sincerely believe you can improve the world if you learn the skills and processes such work requires. So, if you find yourself genuinely wondering why you have to write an essay, ask your teacher what they hope to learn about you through the process! Then, you can decide how to meaningfully engage in the task with the right tools.
When you use a robot to fake “your writing,” you’re wasting your time, and your teacher’s time, and the financial investment folks at home have made in your education. You’re robbing yourself of the opportunity to learn. Now, some of you might be thinking: But Mr. Cherone, I already know how to write, so why do I have to write another essay? Because writing well is extremely complicated, and to be honest, none of you are great writers yet.
I’m a good writer, not a great one. I still ask people for feedback on my writing all the time, because it is important to communicate clearly in my profession, as in most professions. For example: Several trusted friends provided me with feedback on this speech. (Shout out to Dave, Niki, Mike, Anne, Lisa, and Eliza!) Mr. Intlekofer gives me feedback on complicated emails that I need to send, and I do the same for him.
Why do we do this? I think you already know the answer to that.
Because we are serious people. And yes, I did use AI to superimpose my face onto this image. But the robot erased my glasses, so I added them back in myself. Also, those screenshots of my ChatGPT history and this image are the only things that AI assisted with to create this speech.
Your humanity is precious, my friends. You were created in the very image of the God of the Universe, who spoke all of Creation into existence out of nothing. You are social because God is a Trinity — an eternally-existing perfect relationship defined by love and delight. You are loving because God is Love. You are physical, because God loved the physical world into existence. You have the ability to produce things using tools because God created Adam and Eve, put them in the Garden of Eden, blessed them, and said: “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it.” It is because you are made in the Image of God that you have the capacity to think critically, love compassionately, experience pleasure and joy, seek justice, offer mercy, strengthen your body, heal trauma, appreciate beauty, and be creative. Because you are made in the Image of God, you are capable of human work. And because you live in a world marred by sin, that work is difficult.
This school exists to help you learn how to do human work on behalf of God’s Kingdom. I can’t speak for anyone but myself, but I suspect many of my colleagues will relate to what I am about to say. I teach because I love the work, and I know it improves the world. Yes, teaching is difficult and complex work. But it’s good work, because it is human work. It requires social skill, compassion, love, critical thinking, discernment, virtue, intelligence, and creativity. A robot could never be the kind of teacher who sees something in you that you don’t yet see in yourself. (By the way, if you fancy yourself to be any kind of intelligent, clever, or creative, I dare you to become a teacher.)
I teach because I believe the world will always need human beings, made in the image of God, who have the necessary skills to liberate oppressed people, heal sickness and disease and trauma, and cultivate abundant life in this world. Robots cannot do that. God’s image bearers can. I teach because I believe you were created by God to:
Build unity where there is division.
And make peace where there is war.
And heal the sick.
And cure disease.
And liberate oppressed people.
And care for widows and orphans.
And repair cars.
And cultivate gardens.
And create art.
And construct homes.
And steward creation.
You were created by God to build God’s Kingdom on earth.
That’s what we endeavor to do here at AACS. So, let’s not surrender our humanity to the robots. Put down your phone more often to spend real time with real people. Stop scrolling social media earlier in the evening and go to bed so you can get enough sleep. One of the simplest things you can do to fight back? — leave your phone charging in a different room at night. If you need an alarm, I’ll buy you one. If you have trouble falling asleep in silence, get a white noise or ocean sound machine. Ask someone at home to hold you accountable to this. Go for a walk outside without headphones; all the smartest people in history took walks, and I don’t have time to expand on the reasons why scientists think this increases intelligence, creativity, and physical health. Commit to these things with your friends. Hold one another accountable. Ask adults for help, but know that we are still trying to figure this out, too. See if your family wants to try one of these strategies together. When you’re waiting for the bus after school, talk to students you don’t know very well yet. Write your own essay; don’t ask a robot to write a fake one that literally nobody wants to read. Remember that school is about the process not the product.
You are infinitely more valuable than a robot, because you are made in the image of God.
That’s why Mr. Intlekofer always says that we need you to show up and do the work. Because God made you to be fully human. I think you already know that, but sometimes it is helpful to be reminded.
Let’s pray.
Father God, may our spirits, hearts, and minds become more like yours each day. May we become fully human. May we be liberated from sin and healed from illness and trauma. May we instead have abundant life. Equip each one of us to do the good work to which you call us, and teach us patience and perseverance for the process of learning and growing more into the image of your son Jesus, in whose name we pray. Amen.
I often use AI to assist with early drafting and structuring, but the ideas, content, style, and final writing are entirely my own.
