Almost as soon as stories about ChatGPT and generative artificial intelligence started breaking a few years ago there were people commenting on the impact it might have on education. It wasn’t hard to imagine even the earliest chatbots writing essays better than most students were capable of, and in a world where they were doing all of their essays and taking all of their tests on screens we were immediately tossed into a massive multiplayer Turing test, with teachers being challenged to see whether the work they were grading was real.

Students took to AI like fish to water, with one survey saying that within a year or two 90% of them were using the assistance of AI in writing papers. The one figure I found for Canadian students said that well over half were using AI to do their homework in 2024. I wasn’t surprised by this, or the speed of AI’s adoption, or by the way an increased use of AI led to questions being asked as to what the worth or even the point of an education was if it could so effectively be faked without any effort. There was always another side of the story, however, that I thought all of these reports were missing.

When news of the impact of AI on education started breaking I understood that students were going to make use of it. What I don’t think many people appreciated, because I didn’t see anyone talking about it, was that their teachers would too.

Even when I was at university it was clear to me that many of my professors’ lectures were basically just cribs of other people’s work. In some cases they were adding nothing to decades-old secondary literature that they were almost reading verbatim. Since I graduated I’ve listened to many lectures online, even ones that have been highly recommended by top profs from prestigious institutions, and thought that they could have basically been written by an AI. In an adult education program I’ve been involved in that creates lecture series on topics of interest one such course, on AI, was designed by AI as a sort of cheeky proof of concept.

The fact that professors were cheating didn’t surprise or upset me. Many academics don’t make a lot of money but work on short-term contracts. Why wouldn’t they use AI to prepare some of their lectures? And why would tenured faculty be above taking such shortcuts? In some cases I’m sure that using AI might even make their lectures better.

I recently had lunch with a professor friend where I mentioned this and he seemed surprised and a bit horrified at the thought. I thought he was naive. And a couple of weeks ago a news story that caught my eye gave me some support. According to the story a student at Northeastern University in the U.S. had requested a refund of her tuition after discovering that her professor had been using ChatGPT to prepare his lessons.

Wondering if it was just an isolated incident, she found more signs of AI usage in previous lessons, including spelling mistakes, distorted text, and flawed images.

Because of this, she decided to request a refund for the tuition she paid for the class, since she was paying a significant amount to receive a quality education at a prestigious university. For that course alone, she was paying $8,000 per month.

She pointed out that the same professor had strict rules regarding “academic dishonesty” by students, including the use of artificial intelligence. However, shortly after graduating, Ella was informed that she would not be reimbursed.

Speaking to The New York Times, Rick Arrowood, Ella’s professor, said he had uploaded the content of his classes into AI tools like ChatGPT to “give them a new approach.” While he explained that he reviewed the texts and thought they looked fine, he admitted he “should have looked more closely.”

Arrowood also said he didn’t use the slides in the classroom because he prefers open discussions among students, but he chose to make the material available for them to study.

Meanwhile, a spokesperson for Northeastern University stated that the university “embraces the use of artificial intelligence to enhance all aspects of its teaching, research, and operations.”

Several U.S. universities are adopting similar positions, arguing that the use of AI tools is seen as useful and important by faculty. But not all students are convinced.

On websites like Rate My Professors, a platform for evaluating instructors, complaints about professors using AI are also on the rise. Most students complain about the hypocrisy of teachers who ban them from using AI tools while using them themselves.

Furthermore, many question the point of paying thousands of dollars for an academic education they could get for free with ChatGPT. The topic remains under debate, but most students and faculty agree that the main issue is the lack of transparency.

I don’t agree that the main issue is lack of transparency. I think the main issue is that AI may be better at this than the professors who are using it not just as a time-saving technology but as a crutch or surrogate already, with their numbers “on the rise” given that it’s such a “useful and important tool.” And it’s not just being used in the preparation of lectures. Another story I found in The Byte online talks about a program called Writable that “is allowing teachers to use AI to evaluate papers, which the company says saves ‘teachers time on daily instruction and feedback.'” As the story concludes:

It’s a bizarre new chapter in our ongoing attempts to introduce AI tech to almost every aspect of life. With both students and teachers relying on deeply flawed technology, it certainly doesn’t bode well for the future of education.

Bizarre indeed! The future of education may have AI programs grading essays written by AI, based on lectures prepared by AI, with nobody being any the wiser. In fact, that may not even be the future. It’s almost certainly happening already.

We should be concerned about where we’re heading. But my point is this: don’t just blame the kids.

My grandfather was a village postmaster, and my mother had fond memories of working at the post office with him when she was a kid. My father was a stamp collector, and while this wasn’t a hobby I stuck with I did have stamp albums as a boy that I’ve held on to, along with the boxes filled with my father’s highly eclectic (and I’m afraid not very valuable) collection.

When it comes to my affection for all things mail related, however, what stands out the most is the fact that I lived on a farm most of my life and we received rural mail delivery. I was always impressed by the job these people did, even in bad weather on what were the worst of roads. Living in rural isolation, the arrival of the mail was an event that meant a lot to family and neighbours.

But times change. When I was young there were few courier companies and no Amazon delivery vans (much less drones). There was no Internet and email. There were no flyers or junk mail. People sent Christmas cards. In other words, everything came to you through the mail, and if it wasn’t always something you wanted it was at least something you knew was important.

This is no longer the case, which is why Canada Post, the Crown corporation that handles the mail in this country, is facing such a host of problems. Chief among these problems is their high labour costs and the fact that a lot of what made the mail not only useful but essential is gone. The result is a corporation that is, according to one recent study, bankrupt. Apparently they lost $300 million in just the first quarter of 2025. That’s not sustainable.

Last year the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) went on strike for a month before being ordered back to work in the hope of finding a solution somewhere down the road. That solution hasn’t materialized and as I write this another strike is expected.

I don’t think anyone on either side, workers or management, is under any illusions as to how grim the future is for Canada Post. That said, I do think the mail has a future. I don’t mind that such a valuable service is operating at a loss. I still think a country, especially one as big as Canada, needs a public, national mail system. What has to be faced though is that a dramatic restructuring of the mail, what it does and how it does it, is going to be required.

And when I say restructuring what I mean primarily is contraction. I probably get more mail than most people. But I don’t need daily mail delivery. If they even cut delivery back to once a week I think I’d be fine.

I don’t know how workable this is, but there have been various studies done and other recommendations made that can be picked from. The bottom line though is that in order to avoid collapse some contraction in service will be necessary. I can’t see the current postal service with its over 70,000 employees surviving long.

There’s a lesson here for other sunset sectors of the economy. I’m thinking in particular of universities. These grew at an unreasonable rate during relatively good economic times, but even back in the 1990s there were reports on how necessary some contraction was. In a period of declining enrolments and now caps put on foreign students (the lifeline that was keeping a lot of higher education afloat in this country) I don’t see a bright future for many of these institutions. And again, the alternative to contraction is collapse: just keeping on doing things the way we have until the whole system breaks down. I know it’s become an expression that’s meant to trigger a fierce reaction, but at this point we have to learn how to manage the decline.

Normally with one of my after-the-election posts I’d be looking back on what happened. But with the results of yesterday’s vote being so close it looks as though the story of the 2025 federal election is just getting started.

Some observations can be made. As expected, both the NDP and Green Party did very poorly, though the Liberal margin of victory as of this writing is tight enough that the NDP may still have some role to play. They’ll do so, however, without Jagmeet Singh, an articulate and intelligent fellow who never broke through and ended up outstaying his welcome. He lost in his own riding and his political career, I suspect, is over.

Also as expected the Liberals found Ontario, and specifically the Toronto area, to be a rock of support. Whenever that block begins to shift, and it will, that will be the end for their remarkable run.

In a first-past-the-post electoral system it’s always going to be hard for third or fourth parties to make an impact outside of specific regions. Despite slipping badly, the Bloc Québécois may have an outside influence in what happens now. Which leads me to confess that I don’t pay any attention during elections as to what their platform is as they don’t run candidates outside of Quebec. Essentially I see them as being a party of the right, though it’s an old right in a lot of ways and there were parts of their platform, when I started digging into it, that I found myself agreeing with. I’ll never give up on the dream of abolishing the Senate, for example.

It looks as though Pierre Poilievre wants to stay on as Tory leader (assuming he manages to win his own riding, which was still very much in doubt the morning after). I don’t know if this is a good idea, as he seems like one of those politicians with a hard ceiling due to his personality and campaigning style. On the other hand, Mark Carney doesn’t strike me as a skilled politician and he lacks any common touch, but he made an effective foil to Trump, which is all he needed to be in the present moment. He got a boost from being able to present himself as an outsider and a responsible steward of the economy due to his banking background, but I don’t think that’s going to last long. The default impression he gives is of an arrogant establishment technocrat. In any event, what mandate he’s been given will be to manage the economy through what I think is going to be the stormy weather. I wish him the best of luck, which I think he’ll need.

Update:

Poilieve did in fact lose his home riding, complicating his plans to stay on as Conservative leader.

Political punditry potpourri

Over the years I’ve done a number of posts on Canadian federal elections. This is an index to my penetrating reportage.

Just as a heads-up, I would describe my own political leanings as leftish. But I’m  what’s known today as the “old left,” which leaves me without a stable home in terms of a political party. In any event, I think most political systems in the West, if not broken, are in a bad state of disrepair and almost certainly not up to the challenges we face in the twenty-first century.

Federal election 2015: Before

“I sense a growing divide between public (unionized) and private sector workers both in Canada and the U.S. that could make for a coming split between a party of the state and a party of everyone else. If there is a future for the right it may be here.”

Federal election 2015: After

“It didn’t have to be this way. Canada is, in many ways, a conservative (small “c”) country. But the party’s leadership has been hijacked in the twenty-first century by angry freaks. Stephen Harper like Tim Hudak in Ontario, or even Rob Ford in Toronto could have been a more successful, effective political leader if he’d just been moderately reasonable. But being reasonable isn’t what any of these guys signed on for. They preferred to play ideologues and idiots (or actually were ideologues and idiots). Not one of them could be considered, and this is an important quality for a politician, normal. As I also indicated in my earlier post, the same thing can be said of the current Republican field in the United States. The right has spent years pandering to its base. That base now holds it hostage.”

Federal election 2019: Before

“We’re locked into a nineteenth-century political system, components of which were archaic in the nineteenth century. I don’t like it, but the system is never going to change itself, and indeed will do everything it can to resist any change happening.”

Federal election 2019: After

“One observation I’d make is that we are becoming a more regionally divided nation, which I see as being a sort of work-around of the archaic first-past-the-post electoral system.”

Federal election 2021: Before

“Heaven knows the environment should have been a strong issue to run on this year, but it hasn’t happened. I’m beginning to wonder if it ever will.”

Federal election 2021: After

“So there you have it. An election that nobody wanted ending with a result that will make nobody happy. Which will lead, I am sure, to more anger. A forecast of sunny days ahead.”

Federal election 2025: Before

“The way the election flipped on a dime (if that metaphor makes sense) represents one of the most dramatic turnarounds in Canadian political history. In fact, for its speed and for the size of the swing it probably is the most dramatic turnaround we’ve ever seen. ”

Federal election 2025: After

“But with the results of yesterday’s vote being so close it looks as though the story of the 2025 federal election is just getting started.”

 

 

We’re less than a week out from another federal election here in Canada, so it’s time for another of my super-perceptive and unerringly prophetic political posts.

The story of this election has been the crazy reversal of fortunes in the polling. Up until the beginning of January the Conservatives were predicted to be on their way to winning in a walk. Then . . . well, here’s the graph (you can click on it to make it easier to read):

That is crazy. The way the election flipped on a dime (if that metaphor makes sense) represents one of the most dramatic turnarounds in Canadian political history. In fact, for its speed and for the size of the swing it probably is the most dramatic turnaround we’ve ever seen. How did this happen?

I don’t think there’s any mystery to it at all. There were three drivers.

(1) On January 6 Justin Trudeau announced he would be resigning as prime minister. It was time. People were tired of him. I said in my notes on a previous election that he made me sick. The rap against him was that he was a pretty boy with great hair who looked good on TV but was a mental lightweight. I think that’s pretty accurate. What I could never understand is how poor a retail politician he was. As his critics never tired of pointing out, he’d been a drama teacher. Why was he such a lousy communicator?

Was he a bad prime minister? He didn’t have an easy time of it what with dealing with Trump and a pandemic. But even so it’s hard to think of his having much of a legacy. Not that this is always a bad thing.

Anyway, getting rid of him gave the Liberals a big bounce. Personally I think Mark Carney is a smart guy but also an arrogant establishment man of the type that the Liberal Party has always elevated to positions of power. I doubt he’ll wear well, but for the moment he’s been able to sell himself as a change candidate as he’s never been a politician. That he’s been the creature of politicians, running the central bank in Canada and then the U.K., seems not to have hurt him yet.

(2) Also on January 6 the American congress certified the election of Donald Trump, beginning his second term. This was probably the biggest factor in swinging the race, for two reasons. First of all, Trump has behaved in an unhinged manner right out of the gate, swinging wildly in terms of foreign policy while managing to insult and offend everyone. It’s hard to overstate how despised a figure he is outside of his base.

This has affected our election not so much because Trump has tainted the political right in Canada (Doug Ford successfully ran against Trump in winning Ontario’s provincial election) but because Pierre Poilievre, the federal Conservative leader, has made a career out of acting like a Trump Mini-Me. Every part of his campaign has been drawn from the Trump playbook, down to saying that Carney was somehow illegitimate for being chosen by a party congress. And the fact is, Canada’s Conservatives just aren’t as good at this stuff as the MAGA movement. Their commercials this cycle, for example, have been terrible. But the bottom line is that while Poilievre has tried to put some distance between himself and Trump, the stink is on him too deep, and it’s shown in the polls.

(3) In a polarized political environment, and with our stupid and outmoded first-past-the-post electoral system, third party support has collapsed. That yellow line on the graph marks the fading fortunes of the NDP. They look like they’re going to get crushed, and all those voters are going to the Liberals, in a strategic shift trying to block the Conservatives.

I don’t think this means the end of the NDP though. I mean, I’ve been predicting the death (even “annihilation”) of the Greens for the last three elections, and they’re still holding on (and good for them!). But I do think Jagmeet Singh is gone after this. Politicians have expiry dates and he’s reached his.

As for predictions, the race is tightening but I’m guessing the Liberals stay ahead and may even pick up a majority. Ontario in particular will be a rock for them, seeing as it just went Tory provincially and voters tend to split the difference. The polls are probably right and I don’t think things will change much between now and election day, in part because there isn’t much time but even more so because this past weekend saw record-breaking turnout for advance polls. My own polling station was just a five-minute walk from where I live so I dropped by on several occasions after I saw the line was too long to bother waiting. I finally voted Saturday night. So the election may already be decided.

Political punditry potpourri

We live in political times, which is an observation that isn’t diminished by the fact that in many democracies a lot of people don’t care about politics at all. We know this because  of voter turnout numbers, a measure of what is the most minimal level of political involvement.

This is a point I first started thinking seriously about twenty years ago while reviewing the pollster Michael Adams’s book American Backlash. “Non-voters are the majority non-party in American politics,” I said in my review. At the time, the most recent presidential election had been in 2004, which felt like another very political time, what with George W. Bush running for a second term after the Iraq War. As a percentage of the voting-age population though the turnout was only 56.7%. In 2024 it was 59%, which was actually down 3.8% from the 2020 presidential election.

In the U.K. general elections in 2024 the voter turnout was nearly the same at 60%, which was the lowest turnout since 2001, when it was 59.4%.

Canada does a little better federally, averaging in the mid-60s in the last couple of decades. But again, these numbers are all national. At the state and provincial level the numbers drop considerably. In Ontario’s just finished provincial election the voter turnout was 45.4% of eligible voters. This was one percent higher than the last provincial election, which was the lowest voter turnout in the history of our provincial elections.

Drill down to the municipal level and the numbers drop even further. In my hometown’s last municipal election in 2022 only 28% of eligible voters voted. A number that was down 8% from 2018! The 2023 mayoral election in Toronto had a turnout of 38%. To take a random municipal election from the U.K., the turnout for the Sunderland City Council election in 2024 was 30.8%. The 2024 mayoral election for London hit 40.5%.

What this seems to underline is the fact that, to invert the famous adage often associated with the American politician Tip O’Neill that all politics is local, today all politics is national. Just as local news media have been dying, leaving no one covering city hall, the public’s attention has been focused more and more exclusively on politics at the national level. And with the importance of the Internet to fundraising this has only become more pronounced.

This is something I find very concerning, for reasons that I’ve talked about before. Chief among these is the fact that a lot of national political debate is of less direct consequence to citizens than what is going on at the local level, and that if no one is paying attention to what’s happening locally you’re opening the door to a level of corruption that (I think) would shock people if they were aware of it. I know I’ve been shocked by it when I’ve had dealings with local government in both rural and urban areas. You know things are bad when a single family has half-a-dozen members filling different jobs on council. But it’s rare to get reporting on this in places that have become “news deserts.”

But to go back to where I started, it’s been locked in for decades now that slightly more than a third of all eligible voters in Canada, the U.S. and the U.K. do not vote and will never vote. If non-voters were a party they would win every election. And that’s at the federal level. On the provincial or municipal level the non-voter party would win landslide majorities. Does this constitute a functional democracy?

If so, I think it’s one that could be improved. In the lead-up to Ontario’s recent provincial election. the Toronto.com website had a poll asking people who seldom or never vote why they don’t vote. 62.5% said their vote wouldn’t make any difference. They are right to be so disillusioned. The three English-speaking jurisdictions I’ve been talking about all use a first-past-the-post electoral system rather than one based on proportional representation. In Germany, which has a proportional representation system, the 2025 general election had a voter turnout of 82.5%, which is the highest since German reunification.

I think proportional representation is a better system, but there’s no chance the political parties will allow it to happen here, as public apathy to it as an issue means there’s no call for change. That non-voting party seems to want to keep their official status of invisibility.

A few weeks ago I found a post on another site where someone had asked an AI to write a film review. The results were what I think you might expect: a bland, clichéd summary of opinion such as you’d get from a review aggregator.

The reason this is what you’d expect is because the way these programs work (and I’m aware that people who understand this field better don’t even consider it to be AI) is to just take all the data there is on a subject and melt it down to something that sounds like a general consensus. So of course it’s going to be clichéd and derivative. Cliché is, by definition, the most common form of expression in the datasets from which it draws on.

What we’re left with is the hive mind, which is where we were heading anyway what with review aggregators and the like. The “wisdom of crowds” is a distillation not of the best that has been thought and said but of everything that’s been thought and said. And I think for a lot of people, and for different purposes, that may be good enough. For people who read genre fiction by the bale, those looking for executive summaries of generally held views, or students looking for a precis.

In the field of aesthetic response or opinion writing, however, is this the best we can expect? I started thinking about this because of an article I read online at the Yahoo! Sports page covering NFL football. I originally pulled a blank on the byline “Castmagic.” Was that a person? People have lots of strange names these days so I thought it possible. But when I clicked on the link to read it I found this:

(This article was written with the assistance of AI and reviewed by our editorial team to ensure accuracy. Please reach out to us if you notice any mistakes.)

I immediately had some questions. It was just a short opinion piece, so what did it mean that it was written “with the assistance of AI and reviewed by our editorial team”? My own sense was that it was written entirely by AI and just proofread and copyedited for factual errors or anything that might get Yahoo! in trouble. I also wondered if this was a direction more news organizations, and not just Internet ones, were going to be heading in.

The subject of the piece was the New York Giants football team. The Giants were a very bad team last year, resulting in their having a high pick in the upcoming draft. They don’t have a clear starting quarterback on their roster and it’s usually assumed that a team in such a situation will pick the best QB on their draft board as this is the most important position to have filled. So the question posed to “Castmagic” was “Is it time for the Giants to draft a quarterback?”

Things didn’t get off to a good start: “As the dust settles from the 2024 NFL season, it’s evident that some teams face more pivotal offseasons than others.”

Well, duh. We’re hit in the face with a cliché right off the bat, followed up by an obvious truism. I didn’t need an AI to tell me this.

As “Castmagic” went along it mostly borrowed from an earlier column on the same subject written by one of Yahoo!’s (human) sports writers. But if I’d been that particular writer I don’t think I’d look at this as being the sincerest form of flattery. I’d probably be worried for my job.

Did “Chatmagic” have any original insights to offer on the question of whether the Giants should draft a QB? No. Here’s the conclusion:

In the end, the Giants’ path forward hinges on navigating the delicate balance between short-term success and long-term strategic planning. Whether through drafting a quarterback or trading down to solidify the entire roster, the Giants face decisions that could define the franchise for years to come. Only time will reveal if they choose wisely.

Really? That’s the takeaway? The Giants have options and “only time will tell” if they make the right choice?

Will “Chatmagic” get better? I think it will, if only because I don’t see how it can get any worse. Or less useful. But I think these early, baby steps give some indication of the issues going forward, at least when it comes to this form of writing. How can an opinion of any value on any subject be fashioned out of a dataset that is just a collection of everybody else’s opinion? These programs aren’t interested in original insights or finding out the truth. Are they even capable of that? Only time will tell . In the meanwhile, what we have now reads like a page of Google search results, just the repackaging of random information, some of which is no doubt total garbage, into a paste of content that you can skim your eyes over before clicking onto what’s next.

There were some 50 comments on the article the last time I checked. Most of them piling on the “dummies” who write sports opinions for Yahoo! Only one of them registered that it had been written by an AI.

Today former finance minister and deputy prime minister Chrystia Freeland announced she is entering the race to become the next leader of the Liberal Party. Her decision comes just after that of Mark Carney, former Bank of Canada and Bank of England governor.

Freeland has to be considered the front runner at this point. She was always touted as a successor to Justin Trudeau, and it was her break-up with Trudeau that basically led to his swift (albeit overdue) downfall. The only other people who have declared themselves as running are Jaime Battiste, Frank Baylis, and Chandra Arya. I have no idea who any of them are. I doubt anyone else does either. Even their constituents.

I think Freeland and Carney are both probably bright people, but have no business running for this position. Freeland got her start as a journalist, and wrote a book on growing wealth inequality called Plutocrats a dozen years ago that I think holds up pretty well. But I don’t think she’s a particularly charismatic type or that aware a politician. She might be a slightly more palatable Hillary Clinton, which isn’t nearly palatable enough. Compared to the rest of the field, however, she stands out. Carney has zero personality and I honestly can’t think of why he’s running. He’s everything Michael Ignatieff was and less. I’ll be shocked if he gets anywhere.

What we have here then are a pair of establishment stiffs who I guess plan to dampen enthusiasm and lean into their lack of personality as an antidote to right-wing, anti-establishment, social media-driven politics. And I don’t think there’s any doubt about who they’re really going to be running against in the next federal election. That is, Donald Trump. Which worked for Justin Trudeau, a complete political moron, but may not be enough to seal the deal again, despite Trump’s best efforts.

Anyway, these are just preliminary thoughts that I’m sure I’ll be revisiting as the next federal election looms into view. My expectations are low, but that means that any surprises may be pleasant ones.