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Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a marvel of modern computing, designed to mimic human thinking by learning from vast troves of information. At its heart lie systems like Large Language Models (LLMs), powerful programs trained to understand and generate human language—think of them as digital librarians, sifting through patterns in text to answer questions or write stories. These models rely on data collected from the internet, a process called web scraping, where public texts like articles or forums are gathered to fuel their learning. AI’s strength lies in this ability to absorb and process information at scale, but its outputs—however impressive—depend entirely on the quality of that data. A flawed foundation can lead to errors or biases, a challenge that demands vigilance.
Creating an AI model is like forging a tool from raw ore: it requires immense effort and precision. Developers collect billions of words through scraping, carefully filtering out irrelevant or harmful content to build a reliable dataset. This data trains the model to predict word patterns, refining its ability to respond sensibly—an arduous process powered by thousands of computers working for months. Yet, the stakes are high: if the scraped data reflects societal prejudices or lacks diversity, the AI may produce skewed or misleading results. Ethical data collection is thus no afterthought—it shapes whether AI unites us through shared understanding or deepens existing divides.
Once built, AI models serve practical purposes, from powering chatbots to summarizing texts, but they are not infallible. They excel at recognizing patterns but struggle with abstract reasoning or unfamiliar scenarios, sometimes generating convincing but false information, known as “hallucinations.” Ethical concerns persist: scraping raises questions about privacy and ownership, as texts—creative works, personal posts—are used without clear consent. AI holds transformative potential, a beacon for collective progress. Yet, without careful stewardship, it risks eroding trust. Responsible innovation—grounded in transparency and fairness—ensures AI serves humanity, not sows discord.
Did You Want to Know More?
For deeper insights into AI and LLMs, explore these resources:
- What Is Artificial Intelligence? – IBM’s overview of AI fundamentals, including its history and applications.
- How Large Language Models Work – NVIDIA’s explanation of LLMs, covering their architecture and training process.
- Web Scraping and AI Ethics – Wired’s analysis of web scraping’s role in AI and its ethical challenges.
My undergraduate University days were nothing like what is routinely described as the ‘University Experience’. It was a much more utilitarian experience – go to class, take notes, and then rinse and repeat the next day. Add review said notes and study as test time rolled around. The social aspect of University was pretty much all but lost on me at the time as the group of friends I had at the time did not attend. In hindsight, not having friends doing the same thing made focusing on my studies much more difficult and it extended my stay at the lovely U by a few years. Lessons learned and what not.
So, my Uni days were, to oversimplify, just highschool but harder. My real learning started or at least the path to intellectual maturity started after I earned my degree. It also helped that my partner was smart af and pushed me to become more rigorous in developing and defending my thoughts and arguments. So when I read this essay I could understand what they where saying, but couldn’t really relate to what was being said of the state of university/college campuses regarding the moral/social development of their students.
For me, finding my moral and ethical centre was quite independent of the educational process, such as it was, during my tenure at the U. Granted, of course, I was being exposed to and learning about topics that would, in the future, inform my ethical-self and boundaries, but nothing on the level which seems to happen in the US college scene. So then while reading this quote intrigued me:
“It is entirely reasonable, then, for students to conclude that questions of right and wrong, of ought and obligation, are not, in the first instance at least, matters to be debated, deliberated, researched or discussed as part of their intellectual lives in classrooms and as essential elements of their studies. “
What? Isn’t inside the classroom where the great arguments and debates should happen? I mean, it is in the university that you can hash out and grapple with the big problems with the help of professors and the knowledge that they bring and provide of the big thinkers that have grappled with these questions in the past. The university is where you can make mistakes and get nuanced feedback that will sharpen your intellectual faculties and better equip you to lead the examine life, right?
(It’s funny – none of this really happened for me – sit in class, get taught stuff, regurgitate stuff – was the order of the day). But yeah, in the formal sense, if you’re not going to university to grapple with the right and wrong questions, then why go? Getting a degree for job is nice and stuff, but attending higher education is supposed to be more than that.
Here is an excerpt from Wellmen’s take on the the state of the university experience in the US:
“The transformation of American colleges and universities into corporate concerns is particularly evident in the maze of offices, departments and agencies that manage the moral lives of students. When they appeal to administrators with demands that speakers not be invited, that particular policies be implemented, or that certain individuals be institutionally sanctioned, students are doing what our institutions have formed them to do. They are following procedure, appealing to the institution to manage moral problems, and relying on the administrators who oversee the system. A student who experiences discrimination or harassment is taught to file complaints by submitting a written statement; the office then determines if the complaint potentially has merit; the office conducts an investigation and produces a report; an executive accepts or rejects the report; and then the office ‘notifies’ the parties of the ‘outcome’.
These bureaucratic processes transmute moral injury, desire and imagination into an object that flows through depersonalised, opaque procedures that produce an ‘outcome’. Questions of character, duty, moral insight, reconciliation, community, ethos or justice have at most a limited role. US colleges and universities speak to the national argot of individual rights, institutional affiliation and complaint that dominate American capitalism. They have few moral resources from which to draw any alternative moral language and imagination.
The extracurricular system of moral management requires an ever-expanding array of ‘resources’ – counselling centres, legal services, deans of student life. Teams of devoted professionals work to help students hold their lives together. The people who support and oversee these extracurricular systems of moral management do so almost entirely apart from any coherent curricular project.
It is entirely reasonable, then, for students to conclude that questions of right and wrong, of ought and obligation, are not, in the first instance at least, matters to be debated, deliberated, researched or discussed as part of their intellectual lives in classrooms and as essential elements of their studies. They are, instead, matters for their extracurricular lives in dorms, fraternities or sororities and student activity groups, most of which are managed by professional staff. “
It seems less of an organic process, and more of a ritualized ‘thing ya do’ to start making the bucks in society. It seems like such a waste that we have strict qualifications to get and to graduate, but at the same time that we’re not challenging people, making them stretch and reform their assumptions about the world. Where else can we have the space to do such important life work?
Sometimes there are things you shouldn’t get used too…
To be honest, I could excerpt most of Bowlby’s book. It is that good. However, little things like time and copyright concerns limit me to providing some of the highlights of attachment theory and how big a change it was from traditional psychoanalysis.
“The first is to provide the patient with a secure base from which he can explore the various unhappy and painful aspects of his life, past and present, many of which he finds it difficult or perhaps impossible to think about and reconsider without a trusted companion to provide support, encouragement, sympathy, and, on occasion, guidance.
A second is to assist the patient in his explorations by encouraging him to consider the ways in which he engages in relationships with significant figures in his current life, what his expectations are for his own feelings and behaviour and for those of other people, what unconscious biases he may be bringing when he selects a person with whom he hopes to make an intimate relationship and when he creates situations that go badly for him.
A particular relationship that the therapist encourages the patient to examine, and that constitutes the third task, is the relationship between the two of them. Into this the patient will import all of those perceptions, constructions, and expectations of how an attachment figure is likely to feel and behave towards him that his working models of parents and self dictate.
A fourth task is to encourage the patient to consider how his current perceptions and expectations and the feelings and actions to which they give rise
may be the product either of the events and situations he encountered during his childhood and adolescence, especially those with his parents, or else as the products of what he may repeatedly have been told by them. This is often a painful and difficult process and not infrequently requires the therapist sanction his patient to consider as possibilities ideas and feelings about his parents that he has hitherto regarded as unimaginable and unthinkable. In doing so a patent may find himself moved by strong emotions and urges to action, some directed towards his parents and some towards the therapist, and many of which he finds frightening and/or alien and unacceptable.
The therapist’s fifth task is to enable his patient to recognize that his images (models) of himself and others, derived either from past painful experiences or from misleading messages emanating from a parent, but all to often in the literature mislabelled as ‘fantasies’, may or may not be appropriate to his present future; or indeed, may never have been justified. Once he has grasped the nature of his governing images (models) and has traced their origins, he may begin to understand what has led him to see the world and himself as he does and so to feel, to think, and to act in the way he does.
He is then in a position to reflect on the accuracy and adequacy of those images (models), and on the ideas and actions to which they lead, in the light of his current experiences of emotionally significant people, including the therapist as well as his parents, and of himself in relationships to each. Once the process has started he begins to see the old images (models) for what they are, the not unreasonable products of his past experiences or of what he has repeatedly been told, and thus feel free to imagine alternatives better fitted to his current life. By these means the therapist hopes to enable his patient to cease being a slave to old and unconscious stereotypes and to feel, to think, and act in new ways. “
-John Bowlby. A Secure Base. pp. 138 – 139.
Now I like me some psychology and here is the thing; these five points share much with Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT), and it looks so simple on paper, yet in the real world the therapeutic process is fraught with so many difficulties and variables.
I often substitute teach with at-risk children and let me assure you, I use any/all of what is said by Bowlby. How do you learn when you don’t feel safe? The quick answer is nothing, but as even this brief quotation shows there is so much that goes into how we react to situations and our learned set of responses to them.
Go read The Bowl, the Ram and the Folded Map:Navigating the Complicated world by Elodie Under Glass. It is fine narrative post with plenty of interesting bits and sheep! It is wool worth your while. However, these paragraphs in particular, caught my educational eye as they articulate not only what happened to me, but what I see happening to those I teach.
“Science is traditionally taught by blowing the minds of students who struggle to understand the workings of pepper grinders, and leaving them to pick up the pieces for themselves. The students then reassemble the fragments of their minds incorrectly, retaining the sexy and surprising bit, and filling in the rest of the gaps with porridge before going out into the world and smugly misunderstanding everything they see in it. Naturally, what they observe in the world does not match the porridge in their heads. Sometimes the students reassess their minds and realize that the world is infinitely more complicated than porridge and that most of their education was a series of easy lies, in which case they are usually doomed to be writers or scientists. Conversely, if they insist that the world actually matches the composition of their porridge, such that the observable world is wrong, then they will go on to be successful and influential.
This is why people still insist that evolutionary biology underlies gender theory, and why they genuinely and honestly think that seasons are caused by the Earth’s elliptical orbit moving it closer to the Sun.
(it seems that there is a certain type of historical accuracy that only makes sense if it matches a historically inaccurate picture of the world.)”
My university days were long, dark, and cold. Socially meh, but then again social has always been on the “meh” side for me. Let’s use the term “methodical” to describe my educational experience, as in, I need “x” coursed to get “x” educational degree so I can get teach students stuff they are not interested in learning. I graduated in 1999 taking the seven year approach to a 4 year program, coming out the other side with bright shiny knollege!!! coupled with important educational ideas and lofty notions of helping children reach their collective potentials.
All of which came crashing down around my head with my very first desk being tossed in my general direction by an angry student one day. Backstory first. Ever the romantic, I took the subjects that I was interested in during my University tenure: Philosophy, History and Psychology and some English because I needed a minor.
My first teaching gig? In areas where I knew stuff? Hardly. It was a week at a school/ranch in rural Alberta specializing in troubled boys who, let me assure you, are not one bit interested in learning what I had to offer. I learned very quickly that the primary attribute required for teaching was patience, coupled with a side of patience then with some patience sprinkled on top, finishing with a delightful dollop of patience for dessert. Behavioural education is a bit of a different beast than the regular educational stream. Less focus on the traditional curriculum but much more focus on character and routine building and other humanizing activities.
I’m disgusted with what people do to their children. The experiences of frustration, anger, and pain whipsaws these kids into cold reactive silence. Their emotional scar tissue protects them and, at the same time, holds them back because progress and maturation requires taking risks which doesn’t happen when you have been playing defense all of your life. Cue all the anti-social destructive habits that make the pain go away, but land you in such lovely institutions as the ranch where I began my teaching career.
I’ve made it into the urban school board now as a supply teacher once again (woo) and stare at the long slog of building relationships and contacts that might get me hired somewhere. I’ve been there and done that once before, and I’m not sure that I want to do it again. I’m not sure is up with all the anecdata, but it was needed to get to this point to answer what the quote from Elodie was getting at – education doesn’t happen unless you undertake it yourself.
The University of Alberta offers off-season courses, amenably called the Spring/Summer semesters in which you can take 12 week courses squashed into a 6 week period. The learning is intense and the requires dedication and perseverance inside and outside of the lectures. Unlike my undergraduate days, I simply loved going to these classes, engaging fully into the learning process and tackling problems that ideas that broke my brain.
Loved it! The stress, the deadlines, the editing, polishing and reediting of essays and position papers, countless hours of review etc, it was great. I excelled in almost every class I took and now look back with a some pride. I did well now, as opposed to my degree studies because of the traits and knowledge learned outside of the ‘formal’ learning. I had no idea how the world worked until I read Chomsky and Zinn. I knew little of the struggles of women until I read BrownMiller (and am currently working through important works in the feminism canon), I knew little about the middle east until I read Tariq Ali and Robert Fisk.
These authors and many more fed my curiosity and growing sense of disgust and unease with the world. None of the knowledge that broke me into the world was ever found in the dim halls of my high school or the too warm/too cold lecture theatres of the University. It was a voyage sponsored alone, until I met and began to interact with my future partner, whose knowledge and scientific prowess/rigor far surpassed my own (still does, I’ve learned not to argue with awesome), goaded me into upping my intellectual game and going further than I thought possible. I owe a great debt to her for helping me build my intellect and foster the rational-academic aspects of my personality.
So how do you square being a teacher with the fact that you are stuffing a hodge-podge of oatmeal into your students heads and then with hoping that somehow they manage to find the path *despite* what you’ve taught them. Past bandying a few phrases about winnowing out the chaff or some sort of survival of the fittest bunk, I’m not seeing much sunshine in this particular situation.
bleatmop
Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
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