A.I and the human part
As both a lecturer and a photographer, I've been thinking about AI a lot lately. Not because I'm worried about it, and not because I'm particularly excited by it either. What interests me is what AI reveals about the parts of being human that we actually value.
In the classroom, AI can now do many of the things students used to spend hours on. Generate reports, propose marketing strategies, write copy, design visuals, produce entire projects with surprisingly little input. Some educators see this as a problem. I'm not entirely sure it is.
The report was never the goal. Learning was.
When I assess student work, what I'm really looking at isn't the document they hand in. It's whether they understand it. Can they explain their rationale? Can they defend their decisions? Can they tell me why they chose one approach over another? When I start asking those questions, it becomes pretty clear pretty fast who understands the work and who just generated it.
Here's the thing though. Some students actually end up learning more because of AI. Once they know they'll be questioned on their submission, they have little choice but to properly get into it. The tool may have helped create the work, but they still need to digest it, make sense of it, and stand behind it. I don't think I've figured out the perfect approach yet. If anything, AI is pushing educators to rethink what learning actually looks like.
Photography raises a different version of the same question.
Every now and then, clients tell me they've tried AI headshots. Some love them. The images look polished, flattering, sometimes almost perfect. Others dislike them for exactly the same reason. They feel artificial. Too smooth, too generic, like a face assembled from a formula rather than a person.
Neither reaction is wrong. For some purposes, an AI portrait is perfectly fine. For others, authenticity matters more than perfection. People rarely say the AI portraits look bad. What they say is that they can’t quite put a finger to it, but the portrait doesn’t feel right. The technology is getting very good at creating images. Being seen and remembered the way you intended, though, cannot be AI-generated.
The more I sit with this, the more I think AI is pushing us towards the same question in both education and photography. If a machine can produce the output, where does the value of the human sit? My guess is it sits in the understanding, not the producing. In the judgement, not the generation. In the meaning behind the work, not just the work itself.
I use AI myself, so this isn't about whether we use it or not. The harder question is whether we slowly outsource the very things that make the work ours in the first place.
Curious how others are thinking about this, especially educators and creatives trying to figure out where the human part fits in an increasingly capable world.
