When the Joke Falls Flat

While working on this week’s episode of Talking the Read, I asked some of my family members to listen to the opening. I was trying something different with the music, and I wanted some feedback. I wanted to, simultaneously, poke fun at and validate the hype surrounding ChatGPT. Like what we’re seeing with most AI tools, ChatGPT can do so much and, yet, at the same time, it falls so short in what we need. This is especially true in education.

(Yes, I used ChatGPT to help prompt the AI-generated discussion for today’s episode. Usually, I feed ElevenLabs a human-written prompt. The perceived irony in all of this doesn’t escape me. But, is it really that ironic anymore? Or, is using AI to discuss AI just the new norm?)

So how did my family respond? Fittingly, my sixty-something-year-old father didn’t get the joke and my tweenage daughter just loved the music. My forty-one-year-old husband complimented me on my editing skills, but declared he wants nothing to do with AI.

Perfect.

These generational reactions represent just one of the many factors that influence people’s attitudes toward AI. And, when it comes to integrating AI in education, attitude is important. But, AI integration is just a small part of the larger conversations that need to be had surrounding our outdated education systems and structures. Bottom line? The struggle was already well in play prior to this AI wave. It’s just that AI is now forcing a long overdue reckoning.

As I stated earlier, the intent of today’s opening was to poke fun at our contradicting realities with AI. But there’s another reality out there poking fun not at AI but at education. If we can see any validity in the harsh claim that “education has become a joke,” then we have to take that “joke” seriously. The memes might be funny, but the reality is not.

How we respond to AI and the reckoning it’s having on education could either rid us of this joke, or make it worse. All of this is at the core of today’s episode.

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Talking the Read

Episode 4: “AI Is Forcing Us to Rethink and Restructure Education”

Show Notes

Today’s episode is based on an essay generated by ChatGPT: “AI Is Forcing Us to Rethink and Restructure Education” (17 May 2025). ChatGPT was prompted to use only the following two articles published in The New York Times:

• “A.I. Will Destroy Critical Thinking in K-12.” (14 May 2025)
• “‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education.’” (13 May 2025.)

Two Things I Learned in Producing This Episode

• Just because you… instruct a generative AI tool to use only the provided information, doesn’t mean it will always honor that instruction. There were two minor hallucinations in the discussion between the chatbots. Their claims weren’t wrong, but they both included specific percentages that did not exist in the fed essay. I also checked the two articles (used to generate that essay) for these specific numbers, but they didn’t exist there either. However, I did my own search and found that one of the percentage numbers did exist in an outside source; and, while I couldn’t find the other percentage number anywhere in a quick internet search, I did find that its claim (sans percentage number) was present in other sources.
• More Sources, More Time. While using ChatGPT allowed me to have Chris and Liam discuss contents from two different articles, the hallucinations required me to check through three sources instead of just one: the ChatGPT-generated essay and the two articles I instructed ChatGPT to use in generating that essay–plus the additional internet searching I had to conduct to figure out how valid or invalid the hallucinations might be.