It is my great privilege to be involved in a work-related Professional Learning Unit titled “Beyond Human, Minds and Machines: Exploring Artificial Intelligence.”

Some folks think that AI will be the bane of our existence. I’m not so sure. I think there are plenty of good uses, but right now I’m more interested in how to help teachers understand that AI is more than ChatGPT, that it will not take over their jobs, and that they might like/need to use it themselves.

Got an angry, unpolished email? Filter it through ChatGPT, and ask it to make it sugar and spice and all things nice. Where you once had sour lemons, you’ll now have sweet lemonade.

Need a lesson plan? It will give you all you need to keep your kiddos “engaged,” as we love to say.

I’m also trying to write this while Sweet Husband and I are watching free episodes of Dallas. Yes, the Dallas, the blockbuster drama that aired from 1978 to 1991. Its theme song and opening credits have replayed in my mind since I snuck around the kitchen corner to see what my parents were watching, so late at night. 

I know now why I was forbidden from seeing it. In the first episode, within the first ten minutes, we see Bobby Ewing fresh out of the shower, dripping wet, celebrating with his buxom wife Pam, in a blue negligee, after she told him she was pregnant. In the second episode, we see the Ewing family gathered around their pool, and once again, busty Pam provides a titillating view for the male viewership of the late 1970s, a time when bras were not especially in style. 

My childhood bedroom was painted canary yellow with equally bright yellow furniture. It’s not a far cry from Bobby and Pam’s love nook at Southfork Ranch. Were my parents inspired by their interior design?

The Ewings, all grown adults, are stacked on top of each other living like rats in that fancy, sprawling mansion. Dysfunction abounds. What else would you expect? 

I also know just why “Who Shot J.R.?” made such a great storyline. Everyone had a reason to try to take out J.R., the vampire of the series. He drains the life out of everything and everybody he meets, and his darling wife Sue Ellen matches his conniving energy perfectly.

Some folks think that AI will be the bane of our existence.

Nope. We were all going downhill way before now, and it all started with the bad acting skills of the cast of Dallas as they delivered poorly written, predictable lines.

It’s almost like Dallas was written by some Large Language Model, or LLM, just like ChatGPT is, way back in the 70s. LLMs work by analyzing vast amounts of text and then using it to predict and produce human-like language. It is not capable of intelligent thought.

But it sometimes hallucinates. When it cannot make an accurate prediction of what the text should be, it makes something up that sounds perfectly plausible but is completely untrue.

So in that way, I guess Dallas has a leg up on AI. 

It was truly one of the best and the worst TV series ever. You knew you should hide your eyes, but you were glued to the tube, or to Pam’s boobs, or to Bobby’s hairy chest, or to J.R.’s scheming.

You really did see what you thought you saw. It was tall cowboy hats, high-rise glassy office buildings, oil fields, sleek horses and fat cattle, and love for the land.

In a world where we don’t know what tomorrow might bring, it’s nice to have something predictable, something certain.

It was not a hallucination, all fourteen seasons of it.

AI would never make it at Southfork.

The truth always came out.