The week before Christmas is finals week at Riverside City College, where I teach writing to college freshmen. There’s the usual college campus angst caused by the combination of high stakes grading and holiday enforced good cheer. I address this with writing prompts that help remind them of all the ways they are doing just fine in life and in college, and assignment deadlines that are flexible.
This term, however, my students and I are trying to make sense of the voluminous hopes, dreams, myths, and theories around generative AI, or GenAI, in college. The information and emotions are literally more than my students and I can process critically. Facts and figures blur. Predictions are proven false before they can even be printed. Monday an expert says GenAI will transform learning; Tuesday another says it will dismantle it; by Friday I’m ready to move to the woods and start over.
Whenever I reach this point of overwhelm, equal parts curious and exhausted, I return to the same strategy that has helped humans make sense of complexity for thousands of years: I tell a story.
It’s how humans think, critically. It’s how humans learn, emotionally.
When the world gets unwieldy, humans turn to narrative to understand what’s really going down. And so, to understand our GenAI moment, I started telling myself a story.
It begins, as many holiday stories do, at the North Pole, to see if that hero from my childhood has one more gift in his bag to help out all the good little girls and boys.
GenAI’s appearance in Santa’s Workshop arrived through Hermey, the once-misfit elf who left the workshop decades ago to become a dentist. Apparently, dentistry wasn’t his forever calling. He arrived radiating the confident glow of someone who has discovered his purpose and knows how to make a keynote slideshow.
“Santa,” he said, brushing imaginary crumbs from his emerald green coat, “I’ve brought you something that will revolutionize the workshop: generative AI. GenAI, if you prefer.”
Hermey delivered his pitch: automated gift forecasting, instant toy prototypes, elf workflow optimization, a predictive naughty-nice model that claimed 99% accuracy, and even reindeer personality analytics. He hoped his sincerity came across like he practiced. Santa listened, nodding and stroking his beard in that way leaders do when trying to follow a younger colleague who speaks fluent buzzword.
Santa, always striving for more joy per unit, decided to give the free tools offered a try. Three months before Christmas Eve, the elves were ecstatic. Then they were overwhelmed. Then they were in open revolt.
Twinkles discovered the GenAI model could produce “unique” wooden train designs. By mid-morning she’d created more than eight thousand variations, each labeled “artisan-crafted by Twinkles.” Sprig, the anxious elf, asked the AI to write the Naughty/Nice list, only to discover it had hallucinated several fictional towns along the fringes of the Mojave Desert, populated exclusively by children requesting yo-yos. Peppermint Joe attempted to “optimize the sleigh,” and the AI suggested outsourcing the entire season to a drone fleet driven by social media influencers.
Seeing the chaos, Santa did what anyone with wisdom to bestow would do to solve this problem: he tried to lecture his way into clarity. He called everyone to a mandatory “AI Learning Circle.” It lasted seven minutes before the elves began secretly prompting the model under the table, one deep faked Santa into endorsing peppermint-based cryptocurrency, and one asked the AI whether stockings have an inherent moral purpose.
So, Santa clapped twice and broke the big workshop into smaller groups. Forget the lectures! Some elves headed to the Toy Archive to compare real toys with the AI’s ideas or Mrs. Claus’s Library to fact check hallucinations. The hungriest wandered to the Cocoa Café for the kind of honest discussion that only happens over whipped cream.
Suddenly the workshop shifted from chaos to learning. The elves questioned the AI’s assumptions, laughed at its mistakes, debated its usefulness, and most importantly learned from each other. GenAI hadn’t solved their problems; it had simply given the problems new shapes, ones they could grapple with together.
Santa stood at the workshop entrance later that month, looking at the sawdust, the half-finished toys, recalling the lively debates about workplace rights. The shop still felt alive to him. It still felt like a place where he could do good work. It wasn’t what he imagined. But it was alive. Human. Elf-ish. And unmistakably meaningful.
The story doesn’t end with the elves conquering GenAI or GenAI conquering them. Like all good epics — ours included — it ends with an understanding: the tools have a place, but they do not replace the workshop. Or the workers. Or the work.
And that, perhaps, is the lesson I needed. Not certainty about my place. Not efficiency in all I do. Just the reminder that our stories — and our humanity — continue to evolve.
As for what Santa will do next year? I’m sure he and the elves are already arguing about it. And honestly, so are we.
Larry Burns is a writer and artist who draws inspiration from the heady mixture of sights, sounds, peoples and places of the Inland Empire. Recent projects can be found at larryburns.net.
