Could a shuttered art school in the Carolina mountains offer hints for education and innovation in the age of AI?

June 17, 2024

Earlier this summer I met with a team of software developers who were training an AI tool. They were using the latest Large Language Models (LLMs) to build a product that can research and write like a professional ghostwriter. For the uninitiated, ghostwriters stealthily author books and articles for their more famous clients. J.R. Moehringer, for example, wrote bestsellers with Andre Agassi, Phil Knight, and Prince Harry.

Much of my career has been spent as a ghostwriter, so the new software was more than just a little interesting. During a tour of the future product, my interest changed quickly from curiosity, to awe and then discomfort as it slowly dawned on me how damned good it was at doing my job.

With the developer team’s permission, I took the reins to see how it might perform with a project I’d not yet started. I wrote a thesis statement, organized chapters, determined my book’s audience, and began to upload reams of research, including interview transcripts with the author, notes, speeches, and then pressed “generate.” Voila, before my eyes, the tool began to generate clean, clear, well-structured prose in the voice of my client.

Now, on closer inspection, it lacked some of the human personality that, in my opinion, makes for great books. There was not the introspection and hint of cynicism many readers would appreciate. Ghostwriters, all writers, are good at that. Still, wow.

I couldn’t wait to tell a young intern who was working with me on several writing projects. He’s an English major at a prestigious liberal arts college. Rather than fascination, however, what I heard from him was something like anger.

“That’s dishonest,” he said. “It’s cheating.”

That surprised me. What’s happening to our spirit of exploration and embrace of innovation? What havoc has a global pandemic, social media, and deep fakes wrought?

At his age, when I was an aspiring reporter, I marveled at the IBM Selectric when it displaced manual typewriters. I’d been ecstatic when desktop publishing erased typesetting and physical page layouts. Digital tape recorders eventually turned lengthy interviews into accurate, ready-to-use transcripts. Software converted piles of raw numbers into data visualizations to make great writing even more powerful.

In other words, technology has been a friend, a tool to writers for decades. What's dishonest about a tool you control that helps you to from vague notes to a polished piece of prose more quickly and easily. Writer John McPhee’s book, Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process, remains unchanged in the age of AI, in my view.

The experience reminded me of The Education of Henry Adams. Adams was the great-grandson and grandson of two American presidents. He was one of the great chroniclers of the late 1800s and early 1900s. In his Education, Adams reflects on the predicament he found himself in during a time of great technical and industrial change: “What could become of such a child of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when he should wake up to find himself required to play the game of the twentieth?”

After graduating from Harvard University, Adams concludes that, “the education he had received bore little relation to the education he needed.”

For nearly a decade I worked on educational grantmaking at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Much of its focus in the United States is on improving educational outcomes, and as a result I studied the various educational programs from early childhood education to college readiness and college success. Despite education’s profound impact on life outcomes, the institutions the provide it can be quite resistant to innovation.

But there are exceptions. I live in Lexington, Virginia, a rural place in Appalachia that was the home of artist Cy Twombly. Reading his biography, I learned that Twombly spent some of his early life at a now defunct art school called Black Mountain College near Asheville, North Carolina. Artists like Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Roberth Motherwell, Robert Rauschenberg and Ruth Asawa also spent formative time at Black Mountain. A museum dedicated to the college remains vibrant in Asheville.

In 2022, the New York Times asked, "Why are we still talking about Black Mountain College?" Like the Bauhaus art school in Germany, Black Mountain College, was a place of experimentation, according to Eva Diaz’s The Experimenters: Chance and Design at Black Mountain College.

Among the many stories that could be told of Black Mountain College her book follows the thread of a single concept: experimentation.

As with other repeatedly used concepts of Black Mountain’s such as community, experience, innovation, or freedom, experimentation was and continues to be treated as a generically positive attribute, at once a broad endorsement of the college's progressive history as well as an encapsulation of its specific history and merits.

Experimentation was in fact a complicated and contested concept defined by projects as varied as geometric abstraction, serialized and mass production, dome architecture, chance based musical composition, and explorations of monochromatic painting.

Experimentation was professed to be a practice that could be shared by all creative producers. In large part, the contradiction reflects the compound meanings of the word experiment and the historically shifting relation between concepts such as innovation and tradition or originality and routine. Experiment shares with empirical and experience a common root in experiri, to try to put to the test.

Are educational institutions putting AI to the test, or shunning it for fear of cheating and dishonest use?

One teacher at Black Mountain, Josef Albers wrote:

I believe dominating education methods in this country are not at all typically American with stereotyped requirements, standardized curricula and mechanized evaluation of achievements. Why must exploration and inventiveness to American virtues play such a minor part in our schools?

Buckminster Fuller was also an instructor at Black Mountain. Writing for Fast Company, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella notes that Fuller’s ideas stimulated a design revolution. “In a world of accelerating acceleration, how can economic and technological capability be enjoyed by all—by design?” Fuller taught that the physical resources of earth can support all of a multiplying humanity at higher standards of living than anyone has ever experienced or dreamed.

Still Relevant

A June 16 New York Times art page article entitled, “In this incubator, artistic visions,” Frank Rose writes about a New Inc venture that matches tech-savvy creators with business-savvy mentors. One example: pick up the phone and tell an artist a story about the textile you’d like to create. Nothing elaborate. Any story will do. The textile in question is a few feet away. While you're talking ChatGPT will decode the emotions as colors on the fiber optics running through the fabric. The system is constantly evolving.

The 34-year-old director of New Inc told the Times that her venture focuses less on making art than on making it in a way that provides a living for the artist.

“I think the days of, like, starving artists are gone. The rent is due.”

In her epilogue on the legacies of Black Mountain College, Diaz asserts that, both scientists and artists share a concept of experimentation. Artists and scientists share a methodological practice and experimental places like Black Mountain College may offer a way forward for today’s education in an AI era.

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