[The Wide Shot] Why I ban students from using AI in class

No gadgets in class.

It’s one of the first things I tell my journalism students every year. I do not allow them to use laptops, cellphones, or tablets. Definitely no ChatGPT or generative artificial intelligence (AI). 

Taking down notes by hand, I tell them, helps them retain information better. 

Over the past two semesters, I have also asked my students to submit handwritten essays, which they are supposed to finish in class. I only allow them to bring one page of handwritten notes containing key concepts or excerpts from our readings, which they can then quote in their papers. 

It is one of my ways to make our essays “AI-proof,” or else many of them will simply ask AI to write their papers. Or they will probably use AI, then rewrite the text in their own words to evade AI detection software.

But am I not robbing my students of the chance to learn AI, which is the tool of the future?

Well, with or without my class, my students are already learning the use of AI. They ask ChatGPT to write their emails, use NotebookLM to organize their notes, and instruct CapCut to edit their reels. I am willing to bet that they know more than I do about AI tools. 

I want to clarify that I am not an AI “denier.” I myself use AI tools in my work as a journalist — from GoodTape for transcribing to Grammarly for proofreading. I cannot deny how AI has made my work more efficient, freeing me up for more consequential tasks. 

The premise, however, is that I have had the benefit of transcribing interviews and proofreading articles the manual way, long before ChatGPT was released to the public.

Lawyer John Molo, in an opinion piece for Rappler, recently discussed AI in the context of law schools. Molo said that when using AI, “a lawyer with years of practice gets a markedly different experience than a first year law student.” 

“A veteran detects errors, nuances, or hallucinations. AI thus augments his existing knowledge and skill (when it gets things right), producing efficiency. When a person lacks the foundational legal skills and knowledge to scrutinize what a chatbot regurgitates, the answer effectively substitutes for it,” Molo wrote.

It’s the same thing for journalism students who use AI without having mastered the basics.

Discovering the skills within

I want my students to learn things the manual way because they have all their lives to use AI, but we are only together for a five-month semester.

I tell my students: We already know how good AI can be. But I want you to discover the skills right within you, not merely the “abilities” programmed into high-tech machines. In other words, I want you to learn to stand on your own, not to rely on technology as a crutch. 

It’s not AI that is good. You yourselves are good.

More than any “tool of the future,” it is the human spirit — intelligent, flexible, and oriented towards the good — that will one day allow my students to conquer new worlds. 

It is all about values.

AI, no matter how useful, is robbing the youth of opportunities that earlier generations learned through the work of their hands.

I learned this nearly 20 years ago when I worked at Probe Productions Inc., the independent production company founded by broadcast icon Cheche Lazaro. Our company produced Probe, the first investigative news magazine on Philippine TV, which aired on ABS-CBN every Wednesday evening at that time. 

As a fresh communication graduate from Ateneo de Manila, I worked as a production assistant for Probe. This meant working as a transcriber, researcher, field producer, script writer, and video editor, all in one. 

Doing fieldwork was fun, but transcribing interviews was bloody and dragging. 

Transcribing interviews meant listening to each audio recording and typing the interviews word for word. Our transcripts were so detailed that we even included parenthetical keywords such as “(laughter)” or “(silence)” to indicate nonverbal cues, which are helpful for tracking whether a person is telling the truth, showing sincerity, hiding something, etc.

A one-hour interview could take me up to three hours to transcribe, if I do the job uninterrupted. But since it is such a boring task, I tended to take several breaks to eat, chat with coworkers, or simply to breathe fresh air in the Probe office garden. Realistically speaking, then, a one-hour interview could take me half of a regular workday. 

Imagine up to five interviews to transcribe per episode.

How we wished there were a robot that could automatically transcribe our interviews — except we thought it was impossible, because how could any machine transcribe in Taglish?

I often remember this nowadays, when I have my interviews transcribed via GoodTape. This AI tool, available in free and premium versions, can transcribe a one-hour interview in one minute, seamlessly processing multiple languages, including Taglish.

If GoodTape had existed two decades ago, I certainly would have used it, too.

But I wonder how I could have learned the values taught by manual transcription.

Transcribing taught me to be patient, diligent, and humble. It was, in fact, one of my first wake-up calls that media work is far from glamorous. It didn’t matter if you came from a good school; you had to put in the hard work. In the words of Probe’s general manager, Booma Cruz, “Work is hard because it is work.”

An educator’s priority

Humility was a value that I, along with generations of journalists, learned through different forms of work in the trenches. But I hope that today’s youth, even with tools like AI transcribers, can learn the same value in other ways, though I think we have not yet discovered them. 

I also hope that more educators will keep their priorities straight.

Father Robert Dowd, the 18th president of the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, recently wrote in America Magazine that in the age of AI, Catholic colleges and universities must redouble efforts “to encourage students, regardless of academic major, to grow in their understanding of what it means to be truly human.”

A priest of the Congregation of Holy Cross, he said that schools, in particular, must encourage students “to cultivate curiosity, creativity, critical thinking, moral courage and compassion through their study of the humanities.” 

“Whereas AI is very good at quickly processing information and offering recommendations, it lacks the discernment, intuition, and interpersonal knowledge that are often crucial to making good decisions amid complexity. AI is not capable of weighing competing values and moral trade-offs — skills so often necessary when making difficult choices, whether about the future of a business or the policies that impact the social, economic, and political well-being of a country,” Dowd wrote.

“Perhaps most important, AI is not capable of recognizing injustice and exerting the moral courage needed to address it,” the priest added.

I speak of imparting values because, for me, it is the most important role of a teacher — not teaching modern technology, not training students in AI. Of course, we need to teach technology in the classroom, no question about that. 

But when technology, by providing shortcuts, gets in the way of shaping human values, the choice becomes obvious. 

We need our youth to shape the world with deep moral conviction, not hollow AI prompts. – Rappler.com

Paterno R. Esmaquel II is a journalist specializing in religion and public life. A former Rappler reporter and news editor, he now writes for international Catholic news outlets, teaches journalism at the University of Santo Tomas, and runs a YouTube channel called The Religion Reporter.