The 2011 documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi follows an 85-year-old sushi chef as he goes about his life’s work and singular passion: perfecting the art of serving sushi. It is the story of a craftsperson and the small repetitions that make up a practice. Through single-minded effort, a man reaches the pinnacle of human achievement in one very distinct activity. This concept is alluring and comforting in the same way that daydreaming about becoming a monk is: righteous simplicity. Greatness is cheap. Genius is too liberally applied. I dream of competence attained through dogged consistency. I want to be a craftsperson. 

The act of developing, refining, and exercising craft is superficially antithetical to the generative AI worldview. Automation promises a lowering of the barriers that might have once separated the dedicated from dabbling novices. Now we can all code or write or create a Sonic OC in a few seconds and skip the struggle inherent to developing a creative practice. It is natural to assume that abundant convenience could prevent the development of great engineers, artists, and thinkers. On an individual level, this is a tragedy. On the scale of humanity, it could be a disaster. This is a valid concern, and the teachers who ascribe to it are coming from a place of unique insight. At the same time, those of us who practice the craft of educating must be proactive in shaping our destiny.

The existence of generative AI tools does not require the loss of human potential any more than the existence of cars eliminates pedestrians. I’ve spent enough time in Houston to know that cities can prioritize vehicles over people, but I’ve also experienced walkable neighborhoods. The systems we build to accommodate technologies will determine how they affect us. Like bike lanes and density incentives, education infrastructure will be key to averting the worst effects of cognitive offloading. 

the maker movement, DIY, and the value of humanness 

Once, browsing websites felt like finding fossilized footprints in a riverbed. You know that life once existed there, and someone took the time to leave their mark. Today, it is impossible to tell what is authentically made by humans. The subreddit r/isthisai is full of posts from the incredulous looking for confirmation that their acquaintances are posting generated drawing portfolios or vacation photos. Many people are opting out of social media altogether, fearful that there are no humans left out here. As many physical communities have been eroded by the evolution of communication in the last 50 years, we are left with empty spaces and the loneliness of a fractured culture. 

If we’re being optimistic, this could be just the right environment for the development of enterprising monks, ready to dedicate their lives to particular passions. The COVID years put many back in touch with the joy of creating. Involuntary leisure time brought people into the kitchen, back to the knitting needles, and breaking out the wispy miniature-size paint brushes. With loneliness came the space to let in fruitful monotony. On some level, we also knew that our new hobbies were a coping mechanism and reaction to a deep trauma. The flip side of the joy of creation is the consuming struggle of making things. We seemed to have gone from sourdough to slop. 

Perhaps in the wake of an artificial digital existence, we will embrace something like the philosophies of the arts and crafts and early punk movements. As what we look at and read becomes increasingly homogenous and soulless, we can take back expression from the machines to make collages and zines, wonky poetry and impassioned diatribes. Our imperfection could become a currency and a way to communicate in richer ways than can be generated by machines. 

Flagrant displays of humanity are the purview of tinkerers and artists. The maker movement is a helpful example of the infrastructure that can facilitate the positive application of technology for good. Places like Instructables or Thingaverse have created a shared set of values around openness and collective improvement. People take time from their practice to offer what they have created and enable others to learn. There is space for people of all skill levels. Shared knowledge is grounded in community generosity. This feels very different from the experience of collaborating with a genAI tool.  

expertise and social construction

The friction of learning is a neurological reality, but it is also a social one. Very little of value happens within the confines of one human brain. AI collaboration can feel like a way to break out of one’s own mind to experience the kind of collaborative meaning making that we crave as humans. I think there is a lot of room for genAI to serve as a tutor and stochastic sounding board. These interactions (as the convoluted result of human-created training data) are still echoes of other minds, and it is important for craftspeople to recognize when interacting with the real thing is in order.

Recently (and also 50 discourses ago) there was a minor kerfuffle over the idea that writers need to actually read things to be any good at writing. Anyone who has practiced any craft should find this confounding. There is no way to develop a practice that does not involve consuming and studying what has come before you. Even folk artists, though not formally trained, gain inspiration from what is ambient to them. The claim that it is not essential to, for instance, read some novels before you write one, is the kind of immature thinking that is endemic to the novice. 

As an occasionally immature person, I understand the impulse. Reading a book can take a long time, and my phone has puzzle games. Taking in the best creative work is emotionally draining and often convicting. By studying different works, you take in the fine details as if they were the subtle changes of direction in the grain of a piece of wood. You learn what the shape of the thing: color, texture, flow, musicality, depth of feeling. The product is no longer a thing. It is the embodiment of a moment in time for a person. You are in conversation with another being in some limited way. Suddenly, the solitary act of engaging with a chunk of prose becomes social. You’re co-creating, and what you brought to the experience has made some new thing. 

Engaging with art outside of yourself is the most human thing one can do. If we’re identifying and preserving what value humans bring into the world, I would put internalizing and sublimating art at the top of the list. The craftsperson is the epitome of this idea. They bring generations of human effort into what they do, creating something that can be taken and layered on infinitely (strange loops). 

tools, technology, and imperfect reflections

There are techno-optimists that see the development of AI models as the ultimate form of social construction. Others see it as the ultimate extraction of labor and creativity into the hands of capital. The characterization of AI tools as a distillation of combined human effort is not a discussion for this essay. I think that the truth will be revealed in application as the result of intentional infrastructure and sustained inquiry. 

Thankfully, our craftspeople are well suited to define what we need to build and what questions we should be asking. We are at the beginning of our exploration of what kind of tool generative AI can be for artists. Like any tool, models can be a jumping off point for creative self reflection, as this UF dance professor explains. Significantly altering the output of AI can be part of process. The success of such use is dependent on the person because only a craftsperson can effectively wield tools. 

This presents a real dilemma to educators: Learners, by definition, are not yet skilled enough to use certain tools efficiently. I could certainly try to sculpt a block of ice with a chainsaw, but that would likely have a soggy and dangerous outcome. We see this often with trainee scholars because AI tools are often marketed as research assistants. Hallucinated citations are easily controlled for and increasingly rare in good workflows. The more pernicious problem is that of cognitive drift. Students are inundated with competent analysis of complex problems. The output is polished and structured to sound trustworthy. They are lulled on an ocean of deconstructed context. When more content than you can read in a whole year is retrieved for you in seconds, it is impossible to filter out noise without durable mental models for what a quality question is and how your work will harmonize with others’ contributions. 

Here we come to scaffolding, infrastructure, and knowing more about what works. There is a space for generative AI in research, but we have to know about what makes an effective researcher to know the contours of that space. So tools and practice must be shaped by practitioners of research. They know how to cool the sushi rice. They have collective knowledge about where intellectual faultlines lie. We run again into the notion of social connection and community as a whetstone. 

The old arenas where we used to go to sharpen each other’s perspectives have degraded. Peer-reviewed journals are collapsing under the weight of synthetic scholarship and generated reviews. Trust between faculty and students is strained and old models of assessment are buckling under the pressure. The incentives of the academy discourage generous collaboration. 

So what does the education infrastructure of the journeyman look like? With a policy hat now firmly on, I propose 4 areas of focus. 

1. Assessment: Measure process, consistency, and deep intellectual and social engagement rather than polished work products
2. Reflipping: Reexamine and reframe what individual instruction means when agents and other genAI tools can summarize lecture videos and articles 
3. Stewardship: Take the investment of human labor, time, attention, trust, and money that we commit to when we adopt technology tools seriously, engaging authentically with students and faculty about their concerns
4. Incubation: Nurture growth–for students, for scholars, for seasoned makers–by creating spaces for humans to commit to sustained, incremental practice of their craft

Imagine the great workshops of human effort we could create. The purpose that could be distilled. The communities of patient progress we could grow. In such a place, tools become incidental. They are only as good as the craftspeople who wield them. 

Disclosure: No generative AI was used to write the initial draft of this piece. I ran the text through a rubric in Claude for feedback on the construction of my argument as a component of my revision process.