Dear colleague,
Here's a question I received a bit ago from one of our teaching colleagues, Mr. Rick Coriell.
Dear Dave,
I have been reading your blog for about 10 years. You have been one of the best mentors I have ever had. I love doing the hard work to get better at a small number of things and satisficing the rest. I am new to the AI game and wanted to know about your take on a copyright issue. I was needing a little feedback on my work and I mindlessly put your website into AI and asked it to pretend it was you to give me feedback on my most recent lesson plans. It was unreal. I felt like I was having a conversation with you, and it felt so helpful. Then I realized I was encouraging AI to steal your ideas and life's work. Where do you stand on this issue of intellectual theft? Thank you again for making my teaching world feel less lonely and richer. Here in the trenches with you.
Sincerely, Rick
I'm so grateful for Rick's collegiality, his honesty, and his heartfelt question. I've got a couple of thoughts on it, and I'd like to share them with you in case you've done similar things or might want to.
First, Rick isn't the first person I've heard of doing this because I've done it myself. Yep. I've asked AI to pretend it's me and give me advice from my perspective.
Now, if that insane-sounding admission hasn't sent you clicking away from this article as fast as you can, let me explain.
Basically, I was curious to know how well AI could mimic my voice and my thinking on matters pertaining to the classroom. So I put it to the test. And the thing is, I didn't even give it a link to my website — I just asked it to pretend it's the educational blogger Dave Stuart Jr., and then I gave it a classroom scenario and asked for advice. This was over a year ago, so I don't remember what it said. But I do remember that it was pretty spot on, and this led me to my next point. It didn't need the link to pretend it was me. That knowledge was already “within” its “mind,” so to speak.
Therefore, my second thought is this: asking AI to pretend it's me doesn't enact a theft of my intellectual property. That theft has already taken place. The most up-to-date AI chatbots — e.g., Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, and so on — have all been trained on basically the entire internet. If it's been posted online, it's been used to educate these models. I could ask Rick to not do this kind of thing out of principle, but from a practical standpoint, the intellectual property debate around AI is moot. The training's already been done. So I'm not worried about it from the intellectual property angle; I'm just one of millions of creators whose work has been used in this matter, absent our permission.
Third, this has all led me to consider what I started writing for to begin with. Why did I begin writing in the first place? Though the full story is one for another day, the gist is that I wanted two things: 1) to deepen my own knowledge and understanding of the work of teaching, and 2) to do that work in public in case it could be of use to others. I can attest confidently to the success of the first goal. Nothing has helped my practice more than writing about it. And Rick's message attests to the success of the second — my work has been helpful to him. My writing has done for Rick what the writing of others (e.g., Jim Burke, Mike Schmoker, Kelly Gallagher, Penny Kittle) has done for me: it has behaved like a mentor.
And so finally, my fourth thought: if asking AI to pretend it's me can help you in your work as an educator, I have no real qualms with it. There are, of course, the general qualms that come with any use of AI: it can only add to the understanding you already have; it can be wrong, in all sorts of ways; it can quickly become a crutch; it has environmental costs. But we're all well aware of these drawbacks to AI. I leave my colleagues to wrestle with those as I do: as thoughtfully as we can.
I will end with an admission though, colleagues. These tools have taken their toll on the creator economy in that they've radically reduced web traffic to creator websites and the appertaining revenue such traffic provides creators with. I've seen bot traffic to the server my site is hosted on explode and human traffic dwindle. This is a broad trend across the internet as AI overviews and chatbots replace the now sepia-toned practice of Googling and doing internet research.
So if you like what I've got going on here at DSJR land, please consider supporting the work through the purchase of my intellectual products. (If this article interested you, you will likely appreciate my pay-what-you-want “Let's Talk AI” offering.)
Thanks for thinking with me all these years, colleague. I can't do it without ya. 🙂
Teaching right beside you,
DSJR
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