Is it naive to have hope right now? Is it just the daffodils and forsythias, explosions of yellow and green that seemed to appear overnight, tricking me into thinking things will eventually get better? Are warm breezes carrying the scent of an awakening earth leading me astray? I don’t know. It’s important to recognize hard times and be realistic about the world as it is, but I also find myself, again and again, coming across things that give me hope.

“It’s because you’re a generalist.” When my friend made this observation about my success with AI, I stopped for a beat. I was sharing my excitement about all the ways AI was transforming my work and creative processes, but I hadn’t connected it to this fundamental aspect of who I am.

I’m preparing to teach a unit on AI literacy to a group of high schoolers next month, and it’s clear that we need to spend some of that time discussing the ethics of using Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT. I’m still working through this stuff myself, particularly because students are sharing their own opinions about it and getting me thinking, so I thought I would take this opportunity to carefully consider the ethics of this type of AI, both as a teacher and as someone who uses LLMs regularly.

Everybody’s seeing bald eagles this winter, it seems, but me. We have a bobcat at school (promptly named “Bob”) that’s exploring campus a bit too much for its own good. Hawks circle the skies above our house, and herons wade in the pond up the street. When I was a kid in the ’70s and ’80s, we didn’t see wildlife like this.