What Humans Can DO That AI Cannot (Marcia Ailana)

Early in my training as an educator, I came across a quote attributed to Albert Einstein that says, “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” Whether or not we can ultimately authenticate that sentiment as coming from Einstein, I was still deeply moved by the valuing of the individual, by the effort to see and encourage the unique greatness in every human being, greatness that may lie hidden by the current metrics used to evaluate it.

I have spent the past 20 years of my career in education finding ways to uncover that greatness and help students not only see it but believe in it themselves. Because I teach rhetoric and writing courses at the collegiate level, I often inherit students who enter my courses with significant baggage from prior school experiences. They have been told in a multitude of ways that they are bad writers. They have studied the literary greats and found themselves lacking. They have faced assessments that left their own writing efforts littered with red ink and with little positive encouragement to offset it. They have struggled to learn the intricacies — and sometimes absurdities — of English grammar and have determined that it is, ultimately, unlearnable and not worth the effort. In the worst cases, they have been directly told by a teacher or mentor that they will never succeed at writing, that they should focus their efforts elsewhere and leave the writing for “those who can” to do.

Students like *Thomas, a thoughtful and engaged undergraduate from Latin America working to earn a business degree through BYU-Idaho’s online program, a program conducted entirely in English which was, for him, a second language. He entered the course with great apprehension because he had been told by teachers in the past that he would find little success in writing and should focus his efforts elsewhere. He believed them. And yet, success in business at some level means success in communication, often through the act of writing. So, he summoned the courage to take the course despite his fears, hoping to muddle his way through.

Instead, he found a fellow human being and instructor willing to fight for him, believe in him and his dreams, and walk the path toward those dreams together. The truth is, that was an easy walk on my part. Thomas is incredibly bright and innovative with a great mind for business. He has the vision and creativity necessary to transform industries. We worked together to strengthen his critical thinking and writing skills in the early weeks, and by the end of our 14-week journey together, he was a strong and capable writer, and I told him so. In an emotional response, Thomas shared with me how he had been (mis)labeled as a bad writer and how that label had limited his sense of what he could be and become. He shared his early fears over my advanced writing course and his certainty that he would succeed at best minimally. And he shared how my comment — that he was a gifted writer — had changed the trajectory of his future, giving him permission, and the confidence, to chase his big dreams once again.

With generative AI, we now have a tech industry that is fueling students’ fears that they are not good enough, will never be good enough, and shouldn’t bother to try. Headlines hit them day after day with news that computers write better than them. Faster than them. That maybe those computers are even more intelligent than them. That certainly those computers will eventually replace them. A tech industry that seems to promote abandoning their dreams and relegating themselves to fixing the machines rather than crafting, creating, innovating, thinking, tinkering, drawing and designing themselves.

It’s an industry betting trillions of dollars that human beings will believe that this change is inevitable, unavoidable. Betting that human beings will believe they are replaceable. But I’m asking my fellow human beings not to buy into the hype, that talk of inevitability. Because there is something humans can do that AI cannot and it is simply, but profoundly, this: thoughtful, attentive, invested human beings have the capacity to see the errors made by other human beings — the moments when we, through ignorance or inhumanity or inattentiveness, cause harm to one another — and to correct those errors and heal those harms. To see potential not yet realized or wrongly denied by someone else. To see the fish capable of swimming so beautifully in brand new waters not yet discovered.

AI cannot correct human mislabeling. When something or someone has been mislabeled in AI, the problem permeates the entire system, casting that error far and wide and, at times, inserting new errors into a global system, errors not easily undone. AI cannot see differently than the training data set before it. As OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a recent interview, “these systems are trained to do something, which is to predict the next word in a sequence. And so, it’s just trying to complete a pattern, and given its training set, this is the most likely completion.”

What I can tell you after more than 20 years as an educator is that there are far too many students who have learned, directly or indirectly, that they are bad writers. That pattern is what generative AI is about to amplify and proliferate. But where AI fails and human beings succeed is in seeing possibility over patterns, in seeing aptitude over prior outcomes, in seeing tomorrow’s opportunities over yesterday’s most likely solutions. And when another human being recognizes our potential, our aptitude, the value of our dreams and the truth that those dreams are within reach for us, it changes lives. It gives us permission to be fully, beautifully, inventively and uniquely human in a way that machines will never match.

So, let the humans lead, I say. Let them correct with each other what others have mislabeled. Let them reveal a forest of new opportunities rather than a single tree of historical thought. And let artificial intelligence serve as simply a tool to be used by the irreplaceable, unconquerable humans.

*Names have been changed to preserve their privacy