Is There Room for Enmity in the A.I. Classroom?

Over the past year, the deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) in high school and college classrooms has called into question the uniquely human elements of teaching. What can a flesh-and-blood instructor offer that a well-tuned machine cannot?

One naturally thinks of affirmation and love, of the teacher as a moral exemplar and a trusted advisor, which are roles that disembodied algorithms can at best counterfeit.

Less obvious is the student’s need for hatred.

Theorists have long recognized that opposition drives identity-formation. As Walter Ong puts it, an individual’s sense of self comes from the knowledge “that something else is not me and is (in some measure) set against me.” We often associate eye-rolling, scorn, spite, and defiance with middle-schoolers, but the same reactions remain important (if more subtly expressed) through all levels of education. Schooling is a protracted struggle, and students learn their lessons in part from feelings of revulsion and revolt.

Alarmed by the sycophancy that LLMs employ and the intellectual laziness that they allow, critics have begun to use similar language, exhorting students to “normalize struggle,” seek out “friction” or “disagreement,” and “grapple with A.I.” Professor Marc Watkins advises his students to

choose courses that will challenge you, even unsettle you. Don’t accept being coddled. When you choose to engage in debates, please have the intellectual curiosity to explore the topic in depth, have the intellectual honesty to recognize the merits of arguments of the opposing side, admit to the weaknesses in your own viewpoint, and have the intellectual humility to admit when you don’t know and wish to learn more.

Sound advice, but woefully incomplete in the current context.

LLMs are already capable of exploring topics and weighing arguments with students, not to mention structuring personal goals and offering encouragement. (“Let’s dive in!”) Thus, Watkins’s vision of “struggle,” construed as a matter of personal choice and individual self-improvement, is easily reconciled with the quantification and benchmarks of artificial intelligence.

Loathing (like love) operates quite differently, creating meaning through human relationships, in which willfulness, idiosyncrasy, and feelings preclude quantification or smooth standardization. By heightening emotion, hatred deepens the personhood of both teachers and students.

Of course, feelings of hatred spring from many sources and encompass many shades of meaning. Some students nurse petty grudges to avoid responsibility for their own wrongdoing. Others perceive condescension from their teachers and repay it in kind. Some rankle at teachers with strong personalities and worldviews. Others feel the stirring of metaphysical revolt, objecting to the very existence of injustice, suffering, and constraint in the classroom or the world at large.

Uniting all these types of hatred are their mimetic effects on the student. Strong feelings bind the individual to the object of disdain, whose attributes he internalizes and mirrors (if only in negation). Thus, every type of hatred is educational insofar as it holds the student’s attention and shapes his character.

The trouble is that not all these lessons are equally educational or necessarily salutary. To set oneself against another can spur achievement (as in athletic rivalries) but, if one is not careful, it can also lead to what the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche calls ressentiment: an unworthy type of envy, insecurity, and conformity that debases the individual as it tears others down. That is why Nietzsche urges students to choose their enemies carefully, noting that “the most spiritual human beings” will test themselves only against life’s “most formidable weapons.”

One need not agree with every aspect of Nietzsche’s philosophy to grant the point. We all need someone to pitch our deepest aspirations against, someone we can both respect and pointedly reject as we chart our own course. It is in this sense that “the man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends,” Nietzsche writes. “One repays a teacher badly if one remains only a pupil.”

To help students strive toward selfhood, the teacher must embody authority—not only communicating information but personifying standards of wisdom, taste, and morals—and must do so knowing that pupils will chafe not only at the lessons but at the teacher herself. Yet, she cannot simply play the foil, pull punches, or abdicate responsibility for the struggle. To become the bearer of student hatred—to stand as an obstacle for the next generation to overcome—is a tragic aspect of teaching, but there is nothing to do but to press on in sincerity and faith.

Unfortunately, both the rhetoric and reality of teachers’ authority have been in decline for a long time. By bifurcating knowledge and value, LLMs now threaten to dissolve this authority entirely. The teacher can no longer be the master of content or technique, while the algorithm cannot embody truth, culture, or human excellence. LLMs already provide students with detailed (sometimes problematic) feedback, but as Abeba Birhane points out, “There is nothing at stake for a generative AI model. It cannot feel a sense of loss, embarrassment, accomplishment or care towards a student, as human teachers do.” An algorithm cannot feel the pangs of doubt or resolve, and for the same reason it cannot elicit existential scorn or hatred. Students know that a machine’s praise or censure rings hollow. They cannot define themselves in opposition to an LLM, and why should they want to?

In Being and Time (1927), Martin Heidegger argues that the modern individual (Dasein) “stands in subjection to Others.” Worse, they are not even “definite Others” but an anonymous amalgam of social conventions: a “dictatorship of the ‘they.’” It is hard to read Heidegger’s diagnosis without thinking about LLMs. In today’s world, he writes, anonymous authority

prescribes what can and may be ventured, it keeps watch over everything exceptional that thrusts itself to the fore. Every kind of priority gets noiselessly suppressed. Overnight, everything that is primordial gets glossed over as something that has long been well known. Everything gained by a struggle becomes just something to be manipulated. Every secret loses its force. This case of averageness reveals in turn an essential tendency … which we call the ‘levelling down’ of all possibilities of Being…. The ‘they’ is there alongside everywhere, but in such a manner that it has always stolen away whenever Dasein presses for a decision. Yet because the ‘they’ presents every judgment and decision as its own, it deprives the particular Dasein of its answerability.

LLMs stifle self-realization because, while they seem ubiquitous and almost omniscient, they also deprive students of any answerable or embodied authority, trapping them instead in a web of probability, generalization, and disembodied “expertise.” Subjection is in some ways intrinsic to education, part of a broader project of discipline and formation, but it must be experienced concretely, in relationship to “definite Others.”

Hannah Arendt warns that as technology expands, it becomes less likely “that man will encounter anything in the world around him that is not man-made and hence is not, in the last analysis, he himself in a different disguise.” Drawing from Heidegger, she underscores the danger of this eerie echo chamber. It is only through encounters with reality (not artificiality) that one becomes truly human. Consciousness begins not in the familiarity and sameness of one’s own mind but in confrontation with an unpredictable, inflexible entity outside the self—whether Nature, God, or (for our purposes) a recalcitrant teacher.

LLMs merely masquerade as the Other. Aggregated and amorphous, designed for fluidity and user satisfaction, they are artificial in the fullest sense of the word. When students engage with an LLM, they are literally talking to no one. How much classroom time should be occupied with such activities? What lessons should they replace?

However one responds to those questions, the answers have nothing to do with processing speed, safety guardrails, or other technical matters. They are fundamentally questions about how we conceive of humanity and whether we are committed to its formation and perpetuation. If we hope to prevent “cognitive atrophy” in our students, if we hope to awaken them to existential meaning, we have to invest in teachers worthy of their attention, their respect, and, sometimes, their hate.

Image Credit: Florida Phoenix