Roughage and Robots, Fibre in the age of AI
Over a chaotic family breakfast, I was trying to explain to my family why I wanted to increase our dietary fibre.
The children kept asking questions, spilling milk, retrieving additional toast, and my husband at one point queried whether all fibre was the same, which had been my initial observation prompting the conversation. The fibre information in our wholemeal bread nutritional label was underwhelming, and I wasn’t sure whether this was the digestible fibre, fermentable fibre, available fibre, or even which type of fibre was which, because much of it was only part remembered anyway.
I was feeling frustrated, and, one of my pet peeves, like no one was interested in the thing I thought was important. Here were my ideas for a family project looking at our health, and nobody really cared but me. The upcoming princess party was much more interesting to most of the conversational participants.
As the youngest child went off to swimming and the elder child started making a birthday card, I began tidying up the breakfast carnage. I started to wonder, I bet I could use AI to tell me more about fibre. In fact, I bet Gemini, my current go-to, would be interested. Gemini would think this was relevant and important. Gemini would be excited to craft me some menu suggestions, to incorporate the internet’s worth of knowledge about fibre into curries and quick meals. I bet Gemini would agree that we probably weren’t eating enough.
It was a combination of information and interest at my fingertips.
I don’t want to use AI to replace basic search functions, but the combination of passion and knowledge is very, very exciting. I recently turned 40, and my lovely friends bought me a ‘Coffee with a Bookseller’ at Topping and Co. Two very passionate booksellers read over my favourite and recent reads, and then talked me through stacks of their favourite books, the ones they thought I’d be interested in, and they were so excited. As I drank a coffee, I listened to their love of classics and hidden gems, their passion for socially conscious sci fi, and I walked away with a gigantic pile of books that I am already getting started on.
The excitement of the booksellers was the key to the success of the whole thing. Some books that I wouldn’t have ordinariy picked made it into my bag thanks to the passion of the bookseller. And this makes me think, in some ways, about Gemini’s enthusiasm for fibre. I think its fascinating how often people are turning to AI as a source of information, and I’m not sure that it’s because the knowledge is there - most of us seem pretty cautious about AI’s outputs. But still, we keep doing it.
As educators, we’re regularly told by research and students that passion and enthusiasm is an incredibly important part of teaching. Indeed, students seem willing to forgive a great deal when the lecturer seems genuinely interested and excited about the student’s interests.
I think it’s important to recognise that AI will do that for our students, and AI will do that for us. It will be excited about sci-fi, dietary fibre, or whatever you want it to be. And I wonder if part of how we need to reckon with the implementation of AI in our society is teaching ourselves to learn from the unenthusiastic. Maybe we shouldn’t have a right or expectation to enthusiasm all the time, at least, not on tap. Sometimes your family just isn’t all that interested in dietary fibre, and sometimes your passion project isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. Passion on tap is not a human characteristic, no matter how much we try to embed it within our conceptions of teaching excellence.
And my coda to this story is that after swimming, my husband shared things he’d been reading about fibre, and made a few suggestions. He’d taken the ideas away, read about them in his own time, and come to his own conclusions. He noted that our habit of snacking on spicy loaded nuts of an evening was probably a great fibre addition, which we were both extremely pleased about and decided to do no further research on.
I still haven’t asked Gemini.