The Disappearance of the Unclear Question

New Piece for UNESCO Education Futures

©Unsplash/mayur_deshpande

On Friday, UNESCO published a piece I co-authored with Victoria Livingstone at Johns Hopkins University Press. It's called The Disappearance of the Unclear Question, and it’s part of the ongoing UNESCO Education Futures series - an initiative I appreciate for its thoughtfulness and depth on questions of generative AI and the future of learning.

Our piece raises a small but important red flag. Generative AI is changing how students approach academic questions, and one unexpected side effect is that unclear questions - for centuries a trademark of deep thinking - may be beginning to disappear. Not because they lack value, but because they don’t always work well with generative AI. Quietly and unintentionally, students (and teachers) may find themselves gradually avoiding them altogether.

Of course, that would be a mistake.

Historically, vague and ambiguous questions have held great educational power. They force us to think, explore, doubt, seek out knowledge, evaluate sources, and articulate our own insights. That’s exactly what makes them useful. In contrast, clear prompts tend to produce clear (and often synthetic) answers. As generative AI becomes better at responding to well-formulated prompts, we risk designing questions around what the technology can handle instead of what actually matters intellectually.

Generative AI is efficient, but learning requires friction. Friction often begins with questions that are hard to answer.

Efficiency, of course, has become a goal in itself across much of the education system. As a result, we’ve learned to treat questions as much as tools for generating output as invitations to deeper insight. But the point of a good question isn’t that it leads to a fast answer - it’s that it slows you down and teaches you something along the way.

We’re not arguing against using generative AI in education. Quite the opposite. But we do propose that higher education needs a two-phase mindset when working with this technology: one that recognizes what AI is good at, and one that insists on preserving the ambiguity and friction that learning actually requires to be successful.

Generative AI can support many wonderful things. But the future of education depends, at least in part, on our ability to keep asking the kinds of questions that machines aren’t great at answering.

If you're curious, I hope you'll read the piece - and maybe even share it with someone in your network.

Thanks, as always, for reading.

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If you haven’t already, be sure to check out Victoria’s TIME piece “I Quit Teaching Because of ChatGPT” and her new Substack. She’s an awesome writer.