Cultivating an Ethics of Attention in the Age of ChatGPT: Bearing With or Circumventing the Encounter “The Blank Page”

A version of the dialogue between the three papers that follow was initially presented at the 2024 Canadian Philosophy of Education Society Annual Conference, at the panel “Cultivating an Ethics of Attention As Meaningful Pedagogical Practice.” The papers broadly explore the cultivation of attention economies, focusing on how youth are encouraged to engage with the world through pervasive digital technologies, and the commercial interfaces and logics of these technologies in educational settings. Attention economies accelerate time, decontextualize and disembody interactions, and harvest attention, often leading youth to experience a “crisis of sense” with regards to the purpose and significance of education. The ubiquity of attention economies – in which attention is directed and seized to meet labour market demands – and the technologies that instrumentalize attention are often absorbed into narratives of technological determinism and accepted as minor consequences of “progress.” This acceptance hinders the possibilities for alternative ways of being together and for cultivating different forms of attention in education. Drawing on Simone Weil’s “ethics of attention,” the authors examine recent concerns over ChatGPT in education. They discuss how attention economies increasingly demand the use of ChatGPT to quickly fill the “blank page,” a situation in which the struggle with meaning and the time it takes to think are regarded as hindrances to efficiency-driven capitalist demands. The allure of ChatGPT, they suggest, lies in its ability to bypass “the void” and circumvent the dilemma of the “blank page,” thereby negating the creative struggle that is essential for enriching pedagogical endeavours. In response, the papers debate the possibility of cultivating an “ethics of attention” as a significant pedagogical practice, one that creates a temporal space in which attention can be liberated, allowing time for students to linger and to wonder about the world. While Weil’s “ethics of attention” offers a reparative response to the increasing encroachment of large language models in education, the authors ask whether we have crossed a peculiar technological threshold that requires a recalibration or supplementation of Weil’s sensibilities. If when writing you are stuck, unsure how to get started, short on time, or would rather direct your efforts elsewhere, generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies like Grammarly, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and Microsoft’s Copilot have the answer. Copilot, for instance, according to Microsoft, helps “jump-start the creative process so you never start with a blank slate again. Copilot gives you a first draft to edit and iterate on – saving hours in writing, sourcing, and editing time” (Spataro, 2023). Microsoft claims this will change the way people work: “those who embrace this new way of working will quickly gain an edge” (Spataro, 2023). For its part, Grammarly presents its generative AI as a writing partner that “makes it easy to raise your grades,” “submit flawless writing,” “fine-tune your delivery faster,” and “edit in one click” (Grammarly, 2024a). Grammarly assures us it will “help students conquer their fear of the blank page” (Grammarly, 2024b). These companies offer enticing relief from the demands of hyper-productivity. To do this, we are emancipated from all the slow, apparently expendable processes like thinking, outlining, stepping away and returning, sensing, reviewing, reasoning, revising, or judging. Instead of all that, now you can spend time doing more important things. What is it, then, that generative AI offers? Effort reduction. An escape from the tedium of reading and writing. Liberation from forms of labour deemed menial, irrelevant, or unnecessary. Indeed, the chatbot can write an essay, conduct a literature review, respond to queries and prompts, revise and edit, read and summarize, draft and outline – all in convincing, if illusory, prose. While plagiarism and misinformation …