My love–hate relationship with A.I.

Haley, Mudi, and I are three years out of undergrad. Max is still finishing up at USC. Let’s just say… things have shifted dramatically between our college years and his. Hack when I was a senior, the “big” cheating scandal was people pulling CS50 answers off secret YouTube videos. Now, cheating with A.I. is as ubiquitous as cursor-tracking online exams — two sides of the same technological arms race.

When A.I. doesn't belong

At the same time, I understand that there’s a time and a place for A.I., and how you use it matters too. I was an English major at Yale, in one of the best humanities programs in the world with professors who pour decades of wisdom and expertise into every seminar. Needless to say, if an English major in that program today told me that they generate their papers using ChatGPT, I’d raise a brow and tell them: get up and give that seat to someone who actually wants to wrestle with words.

When A.I. does belong

But let’s be honest. If I were to go back into that same major with what’s available today, I’d run my paper through ChatGPT to catch last-minute stray commas or broken citations. Heck, I’d generate my bibliography in seconds instead of wrestling with fiddly, ad-riddled mainstays like EasyBib and CitationMachine. And I’d absolutely draft late-night extension emails with A.I. to avoid signing off “Beast, Christie” at 2 a.m. (Even back then, Grammarly was doing a lot of heavy lifting for me.)

Designing with nuance

These are the kinds of things we’re thinking about as we design A.I. I firmly believe this team is the exact demographic that should be tackling this problem. All four of us were students and teachers just yesterday. We studied and taught when teaching was pen-and-paper, then laptop-and-smartboard, and now A.I.-and-online-recordings.

Socra will always put the teacher front and center. That’s non-negotiable. Teachers are more than their lesson plans — they have shaped our lives; they are the classroom.

But Socra will also teach students how to use A.I. responsibly. We want to bring personalized learning to every student's fingertips, and spark, not dull, the human work of thinking. For math and the sciences, Socra will push students to always consider the theory and remember why things work, not just that they do.

What we believe

Our vision is that students will come to learn that generating essays or answers to problems using A.I. isn’t what will help them most. For the humanities, Socra will teach the core cycle of finding evidence, allowing theses and arguments to arise from deep reading of texts, and then delivering writing in a persuasive manner with tension and emotion.

This reasoning process is what students should be graded on. A.I. in education is coming whether we like it or not. We want a seat at the table — because we want it to be designed the right way, by the right people.