I’m just waking up and having my first cup of tea so my thoughts aren’t yet coherent, but I would say something like only you can convey your you-ness. A machine can’t quite capture your mind and emotions and spirit in all its messy glory, and there’s a thrill in putting out something that has its origins in your uniqueness and originality even when it doesn’t pay the bills. So says this old-school writer whose short stories have been published in lit journals barely anyone reads and whose novel was written without AI over the course of a decade while working full-time and is currently on submission via an agent and hopes to be published but also knows the odds of that game are not necessarily in her favor nor will I make more than Pennie’s if and when it gets published but at least I’m giving it a shot. I wouldn’t change any of that for what it’s taught me about perseverance and about myself, something using AI never could have done. And now I sound like an old tea-drinking lady ranting with my fist in the air but I’m good with that too. Thanks for always being thought-provoking and for sharing your you-ness with us!
I would like to be able to convey that aspect of what we can learn about ourselves through the process of this kind of work. It doesn't even need to be writing, necessarily, just something you apply yourself to with purpose and dedication. I want to convince them that's meaningful.
Breathtaking! Thanks for being. I read this in bed after 2nd toddle to toilet (2 a tiptop number for my personal nocturnal micturition!) and to take as commanded my 7 AM levothyroxide ON AN EMPTY STOMACH, seized phone with goal of wearyng my frontal cortex so I could harvest 3 more hours of sleep and hit my recommended nightly 7.5 hour SWEET SPOT, and was electrified, Professor Warner, by your brave, gloriously feckless and sustained civility , faintly maculate and immaculate restraint. How estimable. No kidding! How grateful I am, though both penniless and penurious, that I once long ago subscribed. Thank you.
A little different context, but I was asked to share about choosing a college at my alma mater high school recently, and this was my second point. I cited you and told kids to get your Writer’s Practice book. One of my angles of appeal was that, because writing is thinking, reading broadly and learning to write clearly is how you learn to think for yourself. It’s one key way you can resist being manipulated. ‘Cause who likes the thought of being manipulated? https://hmm.vic.ooo/2025/01/23/on-choosing-a-college/
Very interesting personal tale. One of the things I do want to get across that your story reflects is the importance of developing "agency" where you act with personal purpose, rather than following a path someone else prescribed for you. I definitely didn't have that at the time I started college, and though I didn't struggle to the degree you did, I definitely didn't take full advantage of the opportunities available to me.
We write because we don't know what's on the other side of the line, the sentence, the paragraph, the story, the essay. A preamble can set on a country on a two hundred plus year odyssey to live up to its ideals. A list can topple kings. The work of writing, of making sense of the world, ourselves, of leaving a record, of creating possibility enlarges us beyond what we currently are, where we currently exist, transcending time and place. It's no wonder the powerful don't want people to do it. Leave it to the machines. Do not imagine what else might be. Do not follow the sentence to the other side. People emerge from intense reading and writing changed. How would that serve power?
Unsure how I can help with your conversation with those students. Good advice I received in my life was to just be yourself. Which I realized was only helpful when I learned who I was. Since, as it appears in your writing, you have a solid sense of self, you've got this!
Among the reasons I read your column in the Chicago Tribune, at the top resides my enjoyment of your honest voice. John Warner appears there, and here, weekly living his life on the page. He is a nice (a desirable rare quality) guy with whom I could chat about the weather in Charleston, being from Chicago, and how to learn to write at 70+ years old with little experience in the past chapters of my life with that skill set. So, if you can inspire a senior in life, I am sure you can inspire seniors in college!
I would say that the work of learning is about paying attention. And that the more we pay attention—to what is going on inside and outside of us, to what has gone on and might later or never go on— the more connected and alive we are. It can be grueling, painful, frustrating, but also interesting, joyful and hilarious. It’s how to participate in our own lives.
Yes, paying attention in a deep way is almost a skill, I think, something we can practice and develop. Part of the problem is they haven't experienced school as a way to practice this. I don't want to outright attack "school" as something not worth their time, but I do ant to make them see that there is something beyond schooling when it comes to learning.
My favorite memories of school were those rare eureka moments when I struggled to come up with and idea and express it in a way that I was proud of. If students use AI, how will they ever get the experience of using writing to create / realize their own thinking? I don’t even know what I really mean or think until I start writing about it. Also, if students rely on AI and don’t have a lifetime of reading and writing experience, how will they know if the text that AI generates is any good?
Not having the background to evaluate the output beyond surface features is one of the things I'm most worried about in how this tech is beyond integrated into schools. If it "looks" like an A, that seems to be good enough, but they're often judging it on surface-level features.
For years our academic culture, where the study of literature unfortunately now almost entirely resides, has basically been telling students that books are good when they are propaganda for things we like and bad when they are propaganda for things we don't like. This is a cheap, reductive, and lazy lens that narrows the scope of experience that it is possible to have from reading. One thing the promulgation of this view everywhere over decades has done is to leave us defenseless in arguments with people who decide to attack our preferences. Because If they don't care about your cause or are brazenly hostile to it, they've "canceled" you. We created the weapon that the bastards are now beating us about the head with.
Reading is a discipline of the mind, just like dance is a discipline of the body--except it's much easier to acquire than dance is. What reading can do for people in the right educational conditions is expand their ability to conceptualize, to imagine different points of view, to engage in and reap the fruits of sustained attention and meditative, curious attention. You can literally study the development of the English novel in the 18th century as the dawning (re)realization that you could apply the imagination in new ways, you could do "unnatural" narrative tricks, to think about critical life problems and that the discovery of this kind of formal plasticity was bracing, exciting, thrilling, and full of potential even yet unrealized, and it is something we completely take for granted but you can read the 18th century novel and see people learning it. The idea that this is somehow less important than "whether it agrees with how I happen to feel about some issue" is the weird American cultural solipsism that I would have found intellectually suffocating if this big diverse culture had not offered me a safe place to shelter from it. And by the way, looking at the effectiveness of the "whether it agrees with how I feel about some issue" approach I see a lot of people standing waist-deep in fail. And we needed to not be failing.
Accumulated experience of breadth and depth is not the same as dexterity and promptness in switching about among academic intellectual fads. It is the ability to build opinion out of experience, out of a sufficient depth and breadth and intensity of experiencing. Of getting in over one's head and discovering that this can be a keen pleasure. There are people whose opinions on the arts I don't agree with but I can recognize, in what they say, the way they are experiencing. That's how I feel for example about somebody like John Ruskin, or Baudelaire as a critic. If I think an artists' or writer's job is to advocate for the opinions that I approve, then there will never be that much of interest, I can't pull them out of the past.
I am interested in their way of experiencing, and when I say that reading to build experience is a discipline, I mean it is a skill, a way of handling attention to what one is reading, that can be acquired and usually has to be. If you ever had a teacher who could help you acquire it, you know that this person gave you a source of pleasure and renewal that will last as long as your brain.
Literature is not an ongoing competition to see who deserves attention and who doesn't, a frame of mind which is one of the more loathsome features of our present cultural moment, to which, again, the response of people who are custodians of the experience of literature has just been pathetic. It's like there is no memory there. Luckily for us it was never up to any one group. You can treat every literature as written for you because there is nothing you can read--and I include even texts from my brother, the closest person in the world to me--that might not wake up your mind in a new way to what you "already know" because you become conscious of how it hits someone else. Do it, because you need all the friends you can get.
I read World Bank reports on education and learn that the tech colonizers are realizing that people need what they call "21st century skills" (that's how they term it at Davos) and what they mean by these is the skills they themselves failed to learn in the 20th century because of the failure of late 20th century literary studies to make a robust defense of its purpose. These are skills the development of which and the critical evaluation of which have been a human project in every culture where material evidence of social life has survived. Wherever humans leave a mark there is evidence of reflection, of making images of the inner or outer world. To not understand that what is happening here was literally evolution in a uniquely human form, is a catastrophic intellectual failure, the self-own of all time. the development of consciousness was put in our control at the social level and at the individual level, unlike the development of feet or the development of airports. It has the features of every other human endeavor--a lot of trial and error, lessons learned, failures exhaustively meditated on, causes and responses to suffering, lessons forgotten, lessons rediscovered. If we didn't teach it that way it is because we have been small and mean ourselves. Time to change that.
That is what it is for--the development of the conceptual capacity to open one's mind to new and corrected perception, and the development of the judgment that can distinguish a harmful action from a beneficial one in terms of the welfare of all, to distinguish truth in intent from untruth in intent. What all that stuff is, all those texts, all those images, all those notes, is an accumulation of experience of just about everything. You will not live long enough to see all the life that is possible except in books. That is something we evolved. But people whose only skill (and it is a very low-grade one, in conceptual terms, which is why serious artists don't bother with it) is the "analysis" of propaganda, of "messaging" just look at it and see a big meaningless mess. This is like reverse evolution, the reverse of education. I guess it is good training to be a propagandist, which is most of what the paid work will be for people who have studied literature. But if you want to change that at a deeper level you have to be able to reach there. And the first object of study must be your own motivations. There has never been a better tool than the literary imagination for the development of self-awareness on your own as a person, which is the real test of what you are as a specimen of humanness: what you do with what you've been given.
I am watching R' Reuven Kimelman's shiur on the Song at the Sea which I know well from attempting to say it every day and am reminded of almost every commentary on Shalom Aleichem's Tevye that even though he is supposed to be a very simple person he is capable of great wit and creativity with texts like the prayer book that are part of daily existence. Broadly literate people are able to think with the full expressiveness of language from books that they know well. They also develop analytical abilities to think about what new information is important to get in any new situation.
I agree with everyone that you should write it yourself because "How do I know what I think until I see what I say?" AI-generated texts are currently at the stage where everyone and no one could have written it because a) if the AI wrote it with a distinct personality we might question if it is a person b) AI companies want the biggest number of possible users
Every year I end my AP Literature course post exam by giving students a ridiculously open-ended project asking them to write about what is meaningful to them—and every year they find such innovative, authentic ways to express meaning through writing. It's the joy of joys as a teacher.
I'm making a few adjustments this year and, as I typically do, coming up with a new sample of my own design—so I literally spent a good chunk of this weekend imagining what I want to write about for my own project.
I decided I am going to create something to try and explain why "Writing" means so much to me...and I have until the first week of May to do it. (So I'll let you know what I come up with by then!)
I do a similar thing at the end of my A.P. Literature class. It would be cool to share some of the best ones. If you're game for some dialogue and an exchange, let me know:
I've been writing a lot lately about the experiential block plan classes I took at Colorado College and how, 17 years later, it is becoming clear why they were essential in a whole new dimension.
A month-long class in Santiago de Chile had me reading writing from both the Allende era and the time after Pinochet's brutal coup, where thousands of people were "disappeared" and taken to torture centers for opposing his regime. Our main question was: How does literature change during/after such an event? The lush seaside poems of Neruda gave way to plays full of silence. I've been thinking of this class endlessly in our current political era, as I explore the question of what a writer is FOR and how that changes in a time of political repression. I also took classes like "The Poet As A Witness to War," "South Africa Under Apartheid," and "Development and Underdevelopment in West Africa" (which traced what happened in the Sierra Leonean civil war in the '90s and took us there in person 5 years into peace, so we could interview people about where the money comes from, where the money goes, and whether it actually made a difference). Reading so many books and writing papers about how injustices unfold, how scales tip into chaos, how places come back from violence and the role artists can play--all this was a secret curriculum I didn't understand I'd opted into, that now is precisely what I need in this moment.
This type of education was not transactional, and yet it is offering a "future reward" I could not have imagined. Obviously it's a privilege to attend a school with this experiential component, and yet it feels like the answer to AI over and over again is turning toward what cannot be made transactional, and turning towards our own dreams and sense of aliveness and figuring out how learning serves THEM and THE WORLD and not just credentials.
Love the hook of playing SBF's famous line about books and your experience as the writer of Tough Day for the Army. I think your experience as a writer in today's market might resonate. They might be more familiar with video-based platforms, but the aspiration of being a "successful creative in today's digital economy" is something they are familiar with. Thinking about the kind of learning that is needed to succeed in doing that (thinking critically about culture) compared to, say, landing a consulting job or going to medical school (good grades and the right experiences on your resume). Anyway, glad you are getting the opportunity...hope you get a receptive audience.
Beautiful thoughts on a difficult topic! I would remind them of another reason to avoid AI: It wasn't built for and is not being massively promoted to help us everyday humans, to solve OUR pressing problems or make OUR lives more beautiful or meaningful. It is a product designed to cut labor costs for capital owners, fuel a new era of automated warfare and make it easier for the elite to escape the consequence of overtaxed planetary resources. Maybe if we bring consciousness of that to our daily decisions about whether or how to use AI ...
I’m just waking up and having my first cup of tea so my thoughts aren’t yet coherent, but I would say something like only you can convey your you-ness. A machine can’t quite capture your mind and emotions and spirit in all its messy glory, and there’s a thrill in putting out something that has its origins in your uniqueness and originality even when it doesn’t pay the bills. So says this old-school writer whose short stories have been published in lit journals barely anyone reads and whose novel was written without AI over the course of a decade while working full-time and is currently on submission via an agent and hopes to be published but also knows the odds of that game are not necessarily in her favor nor will I make more than Pennie’s if and when it gets published but at least I’m giving it a shot. I wouldn’t change any of that for what it’s taught me about perseverance and about myself, something using AI never could have done. And now I sound like an old tea-drinking lady ranting with my fist in the air but I’m good with that too. Thanks for always being thought-provoking and for sharing your you-ness with us!
I would like to be able to convey that aspect of what we can learn about ourselves through the process of this kind of work. It doesn't even need to be writing, necessarily, just something you apply yourself to with purpose and dedication. I want to convince them that's meaningful.
Good luck with the latest submission!
Breathtaking! Thanks for being. I read this in bed after 2nd toddle to toilet (2 a tiptop number for my personal nocturnal micturition!) and to take as commanded my 7 AM levothyroxide ON AN EMPTY STOMACH, seized phone with goal of wearyng my frontal cortex so I could harvest 3 more hours of sleep and hit my recommended nightly 7.5 hour SWEET SPOT, and was electrified, Professor Warner, by your brave, gloriously feckless and sustained civility , faintly maculate and immaculate restraint. How estimable. No kidding! How grateful I am, though both penniless and penurious, that I once long ago subscribed. Thank you.
P.S. I don't knoe how you do it! That's part of being electrified.
A little different context, but I was asked to share about choosing a college at my alma mater high school recently, and this was my second point. I cited you and told kids to get your Writer’s Practice book. One of my angles of appeal was that, because writing is thinking, reading broadly and learning to write clearly is how you learn to think for yourself. It’s one key way you can resist being manipulated. ‘Cause who likes the thought of being manipulated? https://hmm.vic.ooo/2025/01/23/on-choosing-a-college/
Very interesting personal tale. One of the things I do want to get across that your story reflects is the importance of developing "agency" where you act with personal purpose, rather than following a path someone else prescribed for you. I definitely didn't have that at the time I started college, and though I didn't struggle to the degree you did, I definitely didn't take full advantage of the opportunities available to me.
We write because we don't know what's on the other side of the line, the sentence, the paragraph, the story, the essay. A preamble can set on a country on a two hundred plus year odyssey to live up to its ideals. A list can topple kings. The work of writing, of making sense of the world, ourselves, of leaving a record, of creating possibility enlarges us beyond what we currently are, where we currently exist, transcending time and place. It's no wonder the powerful don't want people to do it. Leave it to the machines. Do not imagine what else might be. Do not follow the sentence to the other side. People emerge from intense reading and writing changed. How would that serve power?
Unsure how I can help with your conversation with those students. Good advice I received in my life was to just be yourself. Which I realized was only helpful when I learned who I was. Since, as it appears in your writing, you have a solid sense of self, you've got this!
Among the reasons I read your column in the Chicago Tribune, at the top resides my enjoyment of your honest voice. John Warner appears there, and here, weekly living his life on the page. He is a nice (a desirable rare quality) guy with whom I could chat about the weather in Charleston, being from Chicago, and how to learn to write at 70+ years old with little experience in the past chapters of my life with that skill set. So, if you can inspire a senior in life, I am sure you can inspire seniors in college!
I would say that the work of learning is about paying attention. And that the more we pay attention—to what is going on inside and outside of us, to what has gone on and might later or never go on— the more connected and alive we are. It can be grueling, painful, frustrating, but also interesting, joyful and hilarious. It’s how to participate in our own lives.
As Mary Oliver writes in "Yes! No!":
Imagination is better
than a sharp instrument. To pay attention, this is our endless
and proper work.
Yes, paying attention in a deep way is almost a skill, I think, something we can practice and develop. Part of the problem is they haven't experienced school as a way to practice this. I don't want to outright attack "school" as something not worth their time, but I do ant to make them see that there is something beyond schooling when it comes to learning.
My favorite memories of school were those rare eureka moments when I struggled to come up with and idea and express it in a way that I was proud of. If students use AI, how will they ever get the experience of using writing to create / realize their own thinking? I don’t even know what I really mean or think until I start writing about it. Also, if students rely on AI and don’t have a lifetime of reading and writing experience, how will they know if the text that AI generates is any good?
Not having the background to evaluate the output beyond surface features is one of the things I'm most worried about in how this tech is beyond integrated into schools. If it "looks" like an A, that seems to be good enough, but they're often judging it on surface-level features.
For years our academic culture, where the study of literature unfortunately now almost entirely resides, has basically been telling students that books are good when they are propaganda for things we like and bad when they are propaganda for things we don't like. This is a cheap, reductive, and lazy lens that narrows the scope of experience that it is possible to have from reading. One thing the promulgation of this view everywhere over decades has done is to leave us defenseless in arguments with people who decide to attack our preferences. Because If they don't care about your cause or are brazenly hostile to it, they've "canceled" you. We created the weapon that the bastards are now beating us about the head with.
Reading is a discipline of the mind, just like dance is a discipline of the body--except it's much easier to acquire than dance is. What reading can do for people in the right educational conditions is expand their ability to conceptualize, to imagine different points of view, to engage in and reap the fruits of sustained attention and meditative, curious attention. You can literally study the development of the English novel in the 18th century as the dawning (re)realization that you could apply the imagination in new ways, you could do "unnatural" narrative tricks, to think about critical life problems and that the discovery of this kind of formal plasticity was bracing, exciting, thrilling, and full of potential even yet unrealized, and it is something we completely take for granted but you can read the 18th century novel and see people learning it. The idea that this is somehow less important than "whether it agrees with how I happen to feel about some issue" is the weird American cultural solipsism that I would have found intellectually suffocating if this big diverse culture had not offered me a safe place to shelter from it. And by the way, looking at the effectiveness of the "whether it agrees with how I feel about some issue" approach I see a lot of people standing waist-deep in fail. And we needed to not be failing.
Accumulated experience of breadth and depth is not the same as dexterity and promptness in switching about among academic intellectual fads. It is the ability to build opinion out of experience, out of a sufficient depth and breadth and intensity of experiencing. Of getting in over one's head and discovering that this can be a keen pleasure. There are people whose opinions on the arts I don't agree with but I can recognize, in what they say, the way they are experiencing. That's how I feel for example about somebody like John Ruskin, or Baudelaire as a critic. If I think an artists' or writer's job is to advocate for the opinions that I approve, then there will never be that much of interest, I can't pull them out of the past.
I am interested in their way of experiencing, and when I say that reading to build experience is a discipline, I mean it is a skill, a way of handling attention to what one is reading, that can be acquired and usually has to be. If you ever had a teacher who could help you acquire it, you know that this person gave you a source of pleasure and renewal that will last as long as your brain.
Literature is not an ongoing competition to see who deserves attention and who doesn't, a frame of mind which is one of the more loathsome features of our present cultural moment, to which, again, the response of people who are custodians of the experience of literature has just been pathetic. It's like there is no memory there. Luckily for us it was never up to any one group. You can treat every literature as written for you because there is nothing you can read--and I include even texts from my brother, the closest person in the world to me--that might not wake up your mind in a new way to what you "already know" because you become conscious of how it hits someone else. Do it, because you need all the friends you can get.
I read World Bank reports on education and learn that the tech colonizers are realizing that people need what they call "21st century skills" (that's how they term it at Davos) and what they mean by these is the skills they themselves failed to learn in the 20th century because of the failure of late 20th century literary studies to make a robust defense of its purpose. These are skills the development of which and the critical evaluation of which have been a human project in every culture where material evidence of social life has survived. Wherever humans leave a mark there is evidence of reflection, of making images of the inner or outer world. To not understand that what is happening here was literally evolution in a uniquely human form, is a catastrophic intellectual failure, the self-own of all time. the development of consciousness was put in our control at the social level and at the individual level, unlike the development of feet or the development of airports. It has the features of every other human endeavor--a lot of trial and error, lessons learned, failures exhaustively meditated on, causes and responses to suffering, lessons forgotten, lessons rediscovered. If we didn't teach it that way it is because we have been small and mean ourselves. Time to change that.
That is what it is for--the development of the conceptual capacity to open one's mind to new and corrected perception, and the development of the judgment that can distinguish a harmful action from a beneficial one in terms of the welfare of all, to distinguish truth in intent from untruth in intent. What all that stuff is, all those texts, all those images, all those notes, is an accumulation of experience of just about everything. You will not live long enough to see all the life that is possible except in books. That is something we evolved. But people whose only skill (and it is a very low-grade one, in conceptual terms, which is why serious artists don't bother with it) is the "analysis" of propaganda, of "messaging" just look at it and see a big meaningless mess. This is like reverse evolution, the reverse of education. I guess it is good training to be a propagandist, which is most of what the paid work will be for people who have studied literature. But if you want to change that at a deeper level you have to be able to reach there. And the first object of study must be your own motivations. There has never been a better tool than the literary imagination for the development of self-awareness on your own as a person, which is the real test of what you are as a specimen of humanness: what you do with what you've been given.
I am watching R' Reuven Kimelman's shiur on the Song at the Sea which I know well from attempting to say it every day and am reminded of almost every commentary on Shalom Aleichem's Tevye that even though he is supposed to be a very simple person he is capable of great wit and creativity with texts like the prayer book that are part of daily existence. Broadly literate people are able to think with the full expressiveness of language from books that they know well. They also develop analytical abilities to think about what new information is important to get in any new situation.
"very simple person"--he's no scholar.
I agree with everyone that you should write it yourself because "How do I know what I think until I see what I say?" AI-generated texts are currently at the stage where everyone and no one could have written it because a) if the AI wrote it with a distinct personality we might question if it is a person b) AI companies want the biggest number of possible users
Every year I end my AP Literature course post exam by giving students a ridiculously open-ended project asking them to write about what is meaningful to them—and every year they find such innovative, authentic ways to express meaning through writing. It's the joy of joys as a teacher.
I'm making a few adjustments this year and, as I typically do, coming up with a new sample of my own design—so I literally spent a good chunk of this weekend imagining what I want to write about for my own project.
I decided I am going to create something to try and explain why "Writing" means so much to me...and I have until the first week of May to do it. (So I'll let you know what I come up with by then!)
I do a similar thing at the end of my A.P. Literature class. It would be cool to share some of the best ones. If you're game for some dialogue and an exchange, let me know:
jeffbergerwhite@gmail.com
Will do at some point this week!
I've been writing a lot lately about the experiential block plan classes I took at Colorado College and how, 17 years later, it is becoming clear why they were essential in a whole new dimension.
A month-long class in Santiago de Chile had me reading writing from both the Allende era and the time after Pinochet's brutal coup, where thousands of people were "disappeared" and taken to torture centers for opposing his regime. Our main question was: How does literature change during/after such an event? The lush seaside poems of Neruda gave way to plays full of silence. I've been thinking of this class endlessly in our current political era, as I explore the question of what a writer is FOR and how that changes in a time of political repression. I also took classes like "The Poet As A Witness to War," "South Africa Under Apartheid," and "Development and Underdevelopment in West Africa" (which traced what happened in the Sierra Leonean civil war in the '90s and took us there in person 5 years into peace, so we could interview people about where the money comes from, where the money goes, and whether it actually made a difference). Reading so many books and writing papers about how injustices unfold, how scales tip into chaos, how places come back from violence and the role artists can play--all this was a secret curriculum I didn't understand I'd opted into, that now is precisely what I need in this moment.
This type of education was not transactional, and yet it is offering a "future reward" I could not have imagined. Obviously it's a privilege to attend a school with this experiential component, and yet it feels like the answer to AI over and over again is turning toward what cannot be made transactional, and turning towards our own dreams and sense of aliveness and figuring out how learning serves THEM and THE WORLD and not just credentials.
Love the hook of playing SBF's famous line about books and your experience as the writer of Tough Day for the Army. I think your experience as a writer in today's market might resonate. They might be more familiar with video-based platforms, but the aspiration of being a "successful creative in today's digital economy" is something they are familiar with. Thinking about the kind of learning that is needed to succeed in doing that (thinking critically about culture) compared to, say, landing a consulting job or going to medical school (good grades and the right experiences on your resume). Anyway, glad you are getting the opportunity...hope you get a receptive audience.
Beautiful thoughts on a difficult topic! I would remind them of another reason to avoid AI: It wasn't built for and is not being massively promoted to help us everyday humans, to solve OUR pressing problems or make OUR lives more beautiful or meaningful. It is a product designed to cut labor costs for capital owners, fuel a new era of automated warfare and make it easier for the elite to escape the consequence of overtaxed planetary resources. Maybe if we bring consciousness of that to our daily decisions about whether or how to use AI ...
I'd spend some time eliciting from the college studenrs where they experience gratitude - for whom/what are they thankful?
Living in a grateful way is a continual reminder of being interconnected with others and with the world.
And this ongoing recognition of interconnectedness gives rise to stories.
Which need to be written and read and....
Good luck with your presentation; I hope you'll report back!