Diligence

Since ChatGPT appeared the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies on learning has been widely debated. Are they handy tools or gateways to academic dishonesty?

Most importantly, there has been concern that using AI will lead to a widespread “dumbing down,” or decline in the ability to think critically. If students use AI tools too early, the argument goes, they may not develop basic skills for critical thinking and problem-solving.

Is that really the case? According to a recent study by scientists from MIT, it appears so. Using ChatGPT to help write essays, the researchers say, can lead to “cognitive debt” and a “likely decrease in learning skills.”

The MIT team asked 54 adults to write a series of three essays using either AI (ChatGPT), a search engine, or their own brains (“brain-only” group). Analysis showed that the cognitive engagement of those who used AI was significantly lower than the other two groups. This group also had a harder time recalling quotes from their essays and felt a lower sense of ownership over them.

The authors claim this demonstrates how prolonged use of AI led to participants accumulating “cognitive debt.” When they finally had the opportunity to use their brains, they were unable to replicate the engagement or perform as well as the other two groups.

To understand the current situation with AI, we can look back to what happened when calculators first became available.

When calculators arrived in the 1970s, educators raised the difficulty of exams. This ensured that students continued to engage deeply with the material. In contrast, with the use of AI, educators often maintain the same standards as before AI became widely accessible. As a result, students risk offloading critical thinking to AI, leading to “metacognitive laziness.”

Possible Preaching Angle: Just as students should use AI as a tool to enhance—not replace—their thinking, so the Bible calls believers to seek wisdom actively without shortcuts.

There’s nothing spooky about ghostworking. The newly coined term describes a set of behaviors meant to create a facade of productivity at the office, like walking around carrying a notebook as a prop or typing random words just to generate the sound of a clacking keyboard.

Pretending to be busy at the office is not something workers recently invented, of course, but it appears to be reaching critical mass. According to a new survey, more than half of all U.S. employees now admit to regularly ghostworking.

According to the report, the results show that 58% of employees admit to regularly pretending to work, while another 34% claim they do so from time to time. What might be most striking are some of the elaborate methods workers use to perform productivity. Apparently, 15% of U.S. employees have faked a phone call for a supervisor’s benefit, while 12% have scheduled fake meetings to pad out their calendars, and 22% have used their computer keyboards as pianos to make the music of office ambiance.

As for what these employees are actually doing, in many cases it’s hunting for other jobs. The survey shows that 92% of employees have job searched in some way while on the clock, with 55% admitting they do so regularly.

The ongoing return-to-office resurgence has left many employees feeling like they’re working inside of a fishbowl, performing for the watchful eye of employers. Employees sensing a greater need to broadcast that they’re getting work done. So ghostworking is a performance. It involves actively projecting an appearance of busyness without actually engaging in meaningful work.

Possible Preaching Angles:

1) Diligence; Employees; Sincerity - Scripture encourages believers to work wholeheartedly, not just for human approval, but as if working for God; 2) Hypocrisy - The act of ghostworking is a kind of hypocrisy—projecting an image that does not match reality.

A British man has unintentionally become a viral sensation after undertaking a meticulous repair of a McDonald’s sign that had become a running topic in the Dull Men’s Club Facebook group. The McDonald’s location at the White Rose Shopping Centre in Leeds, England, featured a sign with a missing inner section of the letter "D," leaving it as an incomplete silhouette.

Steve Lovell decided to fix it. Drawing attention from social media users, Lovell carefully researched McDonald’s branding guidelines and used a 3D printer to replicate the correct design for the sign. His initial repair gained traction online, and when he noticed a second sign at the same location with the same issue, he repeated the process.

Lovell’s dedication was widely admired, even as some joked that his actions made him "too interesting" for the Dull Men’s Club. He acknowledged the humor in the situation: "I think it's the whole pointlessness of this that has caught people's attention. Not many people would notice a sign missing bits from it. Fewer still would be bothered by it and practically no-one at all would bother to spend time and effort actually rectifying it."

The White Rose Shopping Centre joined in celebrating Lovell’s quirky mission by naming him their tongue-in-cheek "Employee of the Month." In a post on social media, the mall wrote, "Thank you Steve, our March employee of the month, for your selfless work — we're lovin' it."

Lovell emphasized that his actions were driven by personal satisfaction rather than corporate loyalty or fame. "The fix wasn't even for the benefit of McDonald's as some people claim," he said. "It was for me, and anyone else that would have noticed. Sharing it was just about the mundane absurdity."

What began as a simple desire to correct a minor visual flaw has turned Lovell into a symbol of endearing dedication to detail — and maybe, just maybe, a bit too exciting for the club that celebrates life's most uneventful pleasures.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Dedication; Humble Service; Perseverance – Many Christians work quietly behind the scenes – living for God's glory and eternal gain, not for recognition.

A landmark study by researchers in the UK found that simple health habits, such as eating a piece of fruit with lunch or running for 15 minutes before dinner, took an average of 66 days to form. Behavioral researchers say two to three months is a safe bet on average, but the more complex the behavior, the more difficult it is going to be to put on autopilot.

Recent research is uncovering how long it takes to cement different kinds of habits—and gives fresh insight into how to make them stick. According to a recent study, simple health habits like handwashing, for instance, take a couple of weeks to develop, while more complicated ones like going to the gym take four to seven months. “You can’t mindlessly go to the gym the way you mindlessly shampoo your hair,” says Katy Milkman, co-author of the study.

One big lesson if you’re trying to establish a new healthy habit: You will have better luck if you can simplify the process and repeat it often. Finding ways to make it fun and setting realistic expectations about how long it will take to establish the habit will help too.

Sometimes just taking part is what counts. Just ask Belgian shot-put thrower Jolien Boumkwo, who competed in the 100-meter hurdles at the European Athletics Team Championships after her teammates had to withdraw through injury.

After placing seventh in the shot put on Friday, Boumkwo turned her attention to the hurdles at the last minute and duly finished in a time of 32.81 seconds – 19 seconds behind the seventh-placed athlete.

Footage of Boumkwo carefully stepping over each hurdle while the other athletes race away ahead of her has since gone viral on social media. She smiled and laughed throughout before being congratulated by other competitors at the finish line.

Just having an athlete take part in the event earned Belgium two points and saved the team from disqualification. Boumkwo’s efforts weren’t enough to save her country from being relegated to the second division at the meet in Poland, finishing 14th out of 16 countries with 250 points.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Sometimes it is the taking part that really counts. In the church this might mean stepping up to help serve even though it is not our primary spiritual gift. We are part of a team and we all serve for the benefit of the body (1 Cor. 12:1-31) and we should do it with eagerness and joy.

Kenyon Wilson, a professor at the University of Tennessee, wanted to test whether any of his students fully read the syllabus for his music seminar. Of the more than 70 students enrolled in the class, none apparently did. Wilson said he knows this because on the second page of the three-page syllabus he included the location and combination to a locker, inside of which was a $50 cash prize. But when the semester ended on December 8, students went home and the cash was unclaimed. Wilson wrote on Facebook “My semester-long experiment has come to an end. Today I retrieved the unclaimed treasure.”

Wilson said he wanted to include the hidden clues to brighten up the semester during the pandemic. “Teaching in a pandemic, I’m trying to do creative things and, you know, make it interesting. The syllabus is a really dry document, but I thought if my students are reading it, I might as well reward them.”

Tanner Swoyer, a senior studying instrumental music education, said that he felt “pretty dumb, pretty stupid” when he saw the professor’s post about the money in the locker.

Wilson said he was not disappointed with his students. When he was a student, he most likely would have also missed the clues, he said. “We read the parts that we deem important. You know, what’s the attendance policy? What are the things I need to do to pass this class? And then there’s other stuff. On the first day of the semester I pointed out: ‘Hey, there are some new things in the syllabus. Make sure you, you know, make sure you catch them,’ and then no one did.”

Possible Preaching Angles:

1) Alertness; Bible reading; Scripture – Believers need to read the Word of God with careful attention because there are many hidden riches to be discovered; 2) Prayer; Promises of God – God has given us very great and precious promises in his Word which we can claim by faith through prayer (2 Pet. 1:4).

When people like Maria Garza are released from the Logan Correctional Center in central Illinois, the staffers there don’t usually want to see them return. But in Garza’s case, they were willing to make an exception.

During her time there, Garza was enrolled in the Northwestern Prison Education Program, earning a bachelor’s degree. But since they didn’t want her release to interfere with her education, she was allowed to return to the classroom via Zoom. In her chemistry class, she’s the only one doing the experiments from home.

According to NPEP program director Jennifer Lackey, Maria was their first student to earn early release while in the program. The Illinois Department of Corrections says that most prison education programs like NPEP are so new that the directors have yet to figure out protocols for re-entry because so few of the inmates qualify for it.

One of the few other prison education programs that address re-entry is North Park University and Theological Seminary, which offers a master’s in Christian ministry through the Stateville Correctional Center. Program director Vickie Reddy says of the four students who have made re-entry during the program.

Garza is grateful to maintain the connection with her classmate. She said, “To me, it’s kind of like a comfort. There are people who would say that once they leave [prison] they detach themselves from everything. But it’s hard to detach yourself from the people that understand what you’re going through.”

Possible Preaching Angles:

1) Loving others; Loving the Unlovely - When we do our best to care for incarcerated people, we are demonstrating God's love for the lost and broken. 2) Perseverance; Overcoming – Through perseverance it is possible to overcome failure and achieve goals.

The largely unknown Franz Mohr once claimed, “I play [the piano] more in Carnegie Hall than anybody else, but I have no audience.” Mohr, was the Chief Technician for the world-famous piano makers, Steinway & Sons. A New York Times obituary from Sunday April 17, 2022, described how Mohr worked:

Sometimes a string would snap or a pedal would need adjusting during a concert, and he would step into the spotlight for a moment. But he did much of his work alone, on that famous stage and others around the world. He might have been mistaken for a pianist trying out a nine-foot grand for a recital — until he reached for his tools and began making minute adjustments, giving a tuning pin a tiny twist or a hammer a slight shave.

For years he went where the pianists went. He played before presidents and foreign dignitaries. He also attended to the world’s most famous performers’ personal pianos.

But he never begrudged taking a backseat to the stars. His boss, Henry Steinway, once said, “To understand Franz, one must understand … that his Christian faith is at the core of his being and affects everything he says and does.” Mohr claims that he loved being a “faithful plodder” who strove, in the words of Jesus, to be “faithful in little things.”

Only 44 people have reached the summit of all 14 of the world’s 26,000-foot peaks, according to the record books. Or, maybe no one has. The difference rides on a timeless question getting a fresh look--what is a summit?

Ed Viesturs believes he knows. He is one of the 44, the only American on the list. In 1993, climbing alone and without supplemental oxygen or ropes, he reached the “central summit” of Shishapangma, the world’s 14th-highest mountain. Most climbers turn around there, calling it good enough.

Before him was a narrow spine of about 300 feet, a knife-edge of snow with drops to oblivion on both sides. At its end was the mountain’s true summit, a few feet higher in elevation than where he stood. “Too dangerous,” Ed told himself. He retreated but then he said, “I was one of those guys where if the last nail in the deck hasn’t been hammered in, it’s not done.” Eight years later, Ed climbed within reach of Shishapangma’s summit again. With a leg on each side of the narrow mountain spine, he shimmied across it. He touched the highest point and scooted back to relative safety.

There is a summit, and then there is everything below it. Can close ever be good enough? By asking a simple-sounding question—What is the summit?—the researchers are raising doubts about past accomplishments and raising standards for future ones.

Eberhard Jurgalski has spent 40 years chronicling the ascents of the 26,000-foot peaks. And now he has some jarring news: It is possible that no one has ever been on the true summit of all 14 of those peaks. Some stopped on the central summit, not daring to straddle the ridge the way Viesturs did. Some turned around at a popular selfie-taking spot without scaling the precarious ridge hidden just beyond it.

Climber and author David Roberts says, “The summit does matter. Why does it matter? Because it’s the whole point of mountaineering. It’s the goal that defines an ascent.”

Australian explorer Damien Gildea said, “People are stopping short because it’s too hard. And I say, that’s not really a good excuse for a climber.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

Let’s also beware the danger of giving up before reaching the finish line of the Christian life. Thinking that “close enough” is “good enough” leaves us short of the prize (Phil. 3:14).

Retired US Navy Four-Star Admiral William McRaven spoke to the students at the University of Texas about what needed to be done to change the world:

I have been a Navy SEAL for 36 years. But it all began when I left the University of Texas for Basic SEAL training in California. Basic SEAL training is six months of long torturous runs in the soft sand, midnight swims in the cold water off San Diego, obstacles courses, unending calisthenics, days without sleep and always being cold, wet and miserable. It is six months of being constantly harassed by professionally trained warriors who seek to find the weak of mind and body and eliminate them from ever becoming a Navy SEAL.

Every morning in basic SEAL training, my instructors … would show up in my barracks room and the first thing they would inspect was your bed. If you did it right, the corners would be square, the covers pulled tight, the pillow centered just under the headboard and the extra blanket folded neatly at the foot of the rack — that’s Navy talk for bed.

It was a simple task — mundane at best. But every morning we were required to make our bed to perfection. It seemed a little ridiculous at the time, particularly in light of the fact that were aspiring to be real warriors, tough battle-hardened SEALs, but the wisdom of this simple act has been proven to me many times over.

If you make your bed every morning you will have accomplished the first task of the day. It will give you a small sense of pride, and it will encourage you to do another task and another and another. By the end of the day, that one task completed will have turned into many tasks completed. Making your bed will also reinforce the fact that little things in life matter. If you can’t do the little things right, you will never do the big things right.

You can watch the video here (timestamp 3:45-6:13).

Author Isabel Wilkerson chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: the migration of more than six million black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities, in search of a better life from 1915-1970. Among them was Dr. Robert Joseph Pershing Foster.

Pershing attempted to find employment the summer after his freshman year at Leland College. In the late 1930's, jobs were hard to come by, especially for an African American living in the Jim Crow south. To make matters worse, job preference was regularly given to young Black men who were not seeking a college education.

One summer, he went looking for work at the sawmill. He saw a classmate there from high school and was told the work wasn’t too hard. It was stacking wood staves to make barrels. Pershing asked the foreman for a job, but he was told that there was nothing available.

He was getting desperate. He spotted his friend stacking staves. “Show me how to do this.” The friend showed him what to do, and Pershing worked beside him. He looked up and saw the foreman watching him. Pershing pretended not to see him, worked even harder. The foreman left, and, when he came back, Pershing was still at work. At the end of the day, the foreman hired him.

Pershing finished out the summer stacking staves, not minding the hard work and not finding it demeaning. He said, “Sometimes, you have to stoop to conquer.”

In standardized math tests, Japanese children consistently score higher than their American counterparts. Researchers have found that it has more to do with effort than ability. In a study involving first graders, students were given a difficult puzzle to solve. The researchers weren't interested in whether the children could solve the puzzle. They wanted to see how long they would try before giving up.

The American children lasted, on average, 9.47 minutes. The Japanese children lasted 13.93 minutes. In other words, the Japanese children tried 47 percent longer. Is it any wonder that they score higher on standardized math exams? Researchers concluded that the difference in math scores has less to do with intelligence quotient and more to do with persistence quotient. The Japanese first graders tried harder by trying longer.

Possible Preaching Angle:

That study does more than explain the difference in standardized math scores. It doesn't matter whether it's athletics or academics, music or math. There are no shortcuts. There are no cheat codes. If at first you don't succeed, try, try again.

The workers on Japan’s rail system repeatedly call out to no one and point to seemingly nothing. A train driver checking his speed, for example, does not simply glance at the dial. The driver points at it and shouts out, “Speed check, 80.” When staff check whether the platform is clear, they sweep their arms along their view of the platform, their eyes following their hands, before shouting an all-clear signal. The idea is that associating key tasks with physical movements and vocalizations prevents errors by “raising the consciousness levels of workers.”

The gestures are not an inherent part of the task. But the physical reinforcement helps ensure each step is complete and accurate. It works. Crazy as this may seem, these apparently pointless gestures have helped to make it one of the safest railway networks in the world. This pointing-and-calling safety method … reduces workplace errors by up to 85 percent, according to one study. A similar system has been adapted for use on New York’s MTA subway system. As a result, the number of incorrectly berthed trains has been halved.

The writer David McCullough tacked a plaque above his desk that reads: “Look at your Fish.” It’s a story about the value of seeing.

In an interview from The Paris Review McCullough shared the story behind that short statement. It’s the test that Louis Agassiz, the nineteenth-century Harvard scientist, gave every new student. He would take a smelly, old fish out of a jar, set it in a tin pan in front of the student and say, “Look at your fish.” Then Agassiz would leave. When he came back, he would ask the students what they’d seen. “Not very much,” they would most often say, and Agassiz would say it again: “Look at your fish.”

This could go on for days. The student would be encouraged to draw the fish but could use no tools for the examination, just hands and eyes. One student, who later became a famous scientist, left us the best account of the “ordeal with the fish.” After several days, he still could not see whatever it was Agassiz wanted him to see. But, he said, “I see how little I saw before.” Then the student had a brainstorm and he announced it to Agassiz the next morning: “Paired organs, the same on both sides.” “Of course! Of course!” Agassiz said, very pleased.

When the student asked what he should do next, Agassiz said, “Look at your fish.” Insight comes, more often than not, from looking at what’s been on the table all along, in front of everybody, rather than from discovering something new.

Donelan Andrews was rewarded with $10,000 by his travel insurance company, all for doing something he teaches students to do every day: read carefully. Squaremouth intentionally added language in its policy documentation offering a reward for anyone who was still reading the details. Their intent was to promote the idea of reading the details carefully, because failure to understand the details of what their policies cover is the number one reason why travel insurance claims are denied.

Of course, a denied claim is only one example of the kind of loss lurking in the fine print. In the United Kingdom, Manchester-based firm Purple provided free Wi-Fi access in 2017 for over 22,000 people. Buried in their terms of service was a commitment to a thousand hours of community service, which could include “cleaning toilets and relieving sewer blockages.” In a story with The Guardian, representatives from Purple explained that they inserted the clause “to illustrate the lack of consumer awareness of what they are signing up to when they access free Wi-Fi.”

But even a thousand hours of service is a mere pittance compared to what Londoners gave up when they consented to the “Herod clause” of security firm F-Secure’s Wi-Fi experiment. That clause provided service only if “the recipient agreed to assign their firstborn child to us for the duration of eternity.”

Not to be outdone, British retailer GameStation once changed its license agreement to a pre-checked box. Unless users unchecked the box, they granted the company “a nontransferable option to claim, for now and forever more, your immortal soul."

Potential Preaching Angles: (1) God wants disciples who will willingly count the cost of discipleship, not be suckered into it because they weren't paying attention. (2) The details of Scripture matter to God. It is a matter of obedience or disobedience. Of course God cares about the details because he loves us, not because he’s trying to trick us.

In his book “The Prodigal Prophet: Jonah and the Mystery of God’s Mercy,” Timothy Keller recalls the following:

Years ago, I read an old fairy tale about a wicked witch who lived in a remote cottage in the deep forest. When travelers came through looking for lodging, she offered them a meal and a bed. It was the most wonderfully comfortable bed any of them had ever felt. But it was a bed full of deep magic, and if you were asleep in it when the sun came up you would turn to stone. Then you became a figure in the witch’s statuary, trapped until the end of time. The witch forced a young girl to serve her, and though she had no power to resist the witch, the girl had become more and more filled with pity for her victims.

One day a young man came looking for bed and board and was taken in. The servant girl could not bear to see him turned to stone. So she threw sticks, stones, and thistles into his bed. It made the bed horribly uncomfortable. Every time he turned he felt a new painful object under him. Though he cast each one out, there was always a new one to dig into his flesh. He slept only fitfully and rose feeling weary and worn, long before dawn. As he walked out the front door, the servant girl met him, and he berated her cruelly. “How could you give a traveler such a terrible bed full of sticks and stones?” He cried and went on his way. “Ah,” she said under her breath, “the misery you know now is nothing like the infinitely greater misery a comfortable sleep would have brought upon you! Those were my sticks and stones of love.”

Keller continues: God puts sticks and stones of love in our beds to wake us up, to bring us to rely on him, lest the end of history or of life overtake us without the Lord in our heart, and we be turned to stone.

Law professor and technology expert Tim Lu claims that there's an underestimated force that drives our daily lives—convenience. We want nearly everything about our lives to be convenient, efficient, and easy. Wu calls convenience "the most powerful force shaping our individual lives and our economies." He writes:

As Evan Williams, a co-founder of Twitter, recently put it, "Convenience decides everything." Convenience seems to make our decisions for us, trumping what we like to imagine are our true preferences. (I prefer to brew my coffee, but Starbucks instant is so convenient I hardly ever do what I "prefer.") Easy is better, easiest is best.

Of course there are benefits to some of life's conveniences, but he also warns that there can be a dark side. Wu argues:

With its promise of smooth, effortless efficiency, it threatens to erase the sort of struggles and challenges that help give meaning to life. Created to free us, it can become a constraint on what we are willing to do, and thus in a subtle way it can enslave us … When we let convenience decide everything, we surrender too much.

Possible Preaching Angles: Discipleship; Disciples—Jesus did not offer convenience in following him. He warned us to count the cost and at times to do what is inconvenient in order to follow him.

In his book, Worry Less, Live More, Robert Morgan shares the beneficial effects that habits can have in our lives:

The word practice implies we must go to work developing certain skills until they become habitual or proficient, like an athlete or musician. These are the Bible's perpetual habits for a gradual and glorious experience with the God of peace. In her book Better Than Before: What I Learned About Making and Breaking Habits, Gretchen Rubin called habits "the invisible architecture of daily life. We repeat about 40 percent of our behavior almost daily, so our habits shape our existence, and our future."

Rubin went on to explain that habits reduce the need for self-control, saying, "With habits, we conserve our self-control. Because we're in the habit of putting a dirty coffee cup in the office dishwasher, we don't need self-control to perform that action; we do it without thinking." She also added, "Our habits are our destiny. And changing our habits allows us to alter that destiny."

Any skill, art, or good habit requires more than knowledge. It also requires hours of training and practice. For instance, when Alec Baldwin asked NFL quarterback Andrew Luck what he thinks about when he drops back to pass, Luck said, "You don't want to think about it." Luck went on to describe how passing mechanics have to be so deeply ingrained into the body that they are on autopilot during a game. The body "knows" how to throw, but knows how to read the entire football field.

Being an NFL quarterback is mindboggling. There are eleven men on each team, each one moving simultaneously. And there are a bunch of 300-pound opponents who want to crush you into the ground. It's as if an entire life-sized and live chess match is being played in the blink of an eye. The quarterback has about three seconds to survey the entire field, assessing all the patterns, finding the most open teammate, and throwing a perfect strike to a man who is on a full-out sprint.

With any skill or performance, information alone is not enough; it must be translated into know-how in the body. It's true for athletes, musicians, actors, plumbers, woodworkers, engineers, computer programmers, doctors, nurses, auto mechanics, and hedge fund managers. The skills required for these positions become so ingrained that after years of practice, one can do them almost automatically.

Possible Preaching Angles: Spiritual disciplines, worship, and Christian character/virtue are all the same way—they require hours and years of practice and participation until they become almost automatic.