Redefining Knowledge Worth Knowing: AI and the Reimagining of the Human

• In Event: Assembling Diverse Ways of Knowing

Proposal

This paper uses post-structural and decolonial theory to ask questions about the future of what we consider curriculum, or “knowledge worth knowing” (Spencer, 1884). Unlike the internet, one of the last great “leaps” in technology to affect education, artificial intelligence language models like ChatGPT not only provide students with immediate access to information, but the language with which to convey, critically analyze, and generate responses that are almost indistinguishable from those made by human beings (Stokel-Walker, 2022; Deng & Lin, 2022).
Since its release in November of 2022, scholars around the globe have written about how ChatGPT (and its successors) can help educators, students and parents in educational settings (Zhai, 2023; Sok, 2023; Baidoo-Anu & Ansah; 2023). Leaders of transnational educational organizations like Sal Kahn, C.E.O. of the Khan Academy, argues that AI is the “probably the biggest positive transformation that education has ever seen” (Khan, 2023).
In November 2023, the Pew Research Center found that 13% of all teenagers in the United States use Chat GPT to help with their school work (Sidoti & Gottfried, 2023). In their multinational study regarding post-secondary students in Arab -speaking countries and ChatGPT, Abdalajleel et al (2024) found that over forty-five percent of students in their sample from Egypt, Iran, Jordan, Kuwait and Lebanon heard of ChatGPT, and over fifty per-cent of those students used ChatGPT for their school work (Abdaljaleel, et al., 2024). Seventy-one percent of university students surveyed in Peruvian universities use ChatGPT (Rincon Castillo et al., 2023). The genie is out of the bottle - artificial intelligence in education is here to stay. While many educators are concerned with how to incorporate A.I. into classrooms and how to make sure students turn in original work, a larger issue remains:
How does A.I. change conceptualizations of knowledge “worth knowing”? What is the point of learning if knowledge can be accumulated, analyzed, and stored for retrieval later by an artificial intelligence that we consult when we need to use such information? What becomes of one of the things that separate schools from centers for behavior modification and prisons then? what becomes of “knowledge”?
Does demonstrating “knowledge” become the skill of leveraging information gathered by an A.I. entity? Does the study of knowledge become a study of ethics regarding said information? If an A.I. entity can problem solve, think critically and creatively - If “subject area experts” are obsolete and no longer necessary, does “knowledge worth knowing” for human beings take on a more embodied role? Does knowledge become an exercise in obtaining a specific kind of consciousness?
This question is especially pertinent in “the West,” where personhood is often unconsciously defined by a person’s internalization of western epistemological systems as reality. If a person is no longer valued for curating a “self” that western epistemology facilitates because the internalization of knowledge is no longer needed (knowledge can be retrieved at will from a form of A.I.,) how will that affect people existing in liminal social spaces due to race/gender/nationality/ethnicity/sex in societies in which the internalization of particular “western” epistemologies determines a persons’ value - like the United States or United Kingdom? If that affects people in liminal spaces in those countries- how much more will it affect those living within violent colonial realities shaped by neoliberal global capitalist relations with those same countries? What changes to definitions of human being does AI bring as “big Data flows create and consolidate new informal and formal pathways of bureaucratic and socio-human interconnectivity between educational polities?” (Salajan & Jules, 2021, p.150).
This conversation transcends cultural borders by expanding upon and moving beyond discussions of (1) the dangers of human biases being “baked into” algorithms (Nichols et al., 2021, p. 715) and (2) the erasure of people of color from the “white utopian imaginary” (Cave & Dihal, 2020, p. 687) as discussed by Bradley et al., (2024). This paper presentation joins Baker et. al (2023), Wang & Baker, (2024) and other curriculum scholars in drawing attention to how formulations of human being that depend upon particular conceptualizations of knowledge change. It joins spirit with those calling for a global border crossing decolonial critique of artificial intelligence (Mhlambi 2021; Adams, 2021; Gray, 2024) and utilizes Sylvia Wynter’s (2015) extensive oeuvre to continue to reimagine the human being via the interrogation of emerging orders of knowledge – specifically orders of knowledge that now include artificial intelligence.
In this way, this conceptual paper theorizes the potential impact that a change in conceptualizations of “knowledge worth knowing” that A.I. could bring. Instead of mourning this shift, authors discuss how such a change might provide a tremendous opportunity to re-write and repair the role that western knowledge plays in relation to the “self.” If knowledge is no longer defined as the accumulation of information, how might educators take this opportunity to heal damage that colonial/institutionally racist forms of schooling inflict in its traditional role in western societies as a path to self-actualization?

Authors

• Sarah Ishmael, The University of Wisconsin-Madison

• Bernadette Baker, University of Wisconsin-Madison