Engaging with Film to Teach Students About Virtuous Outsourcing of Cognitive Tasks to LLMs

Recently there has been a call to deploy AI technologies in secondary education. An accompanying worry is that if students became overly reliant on LLMs, they would become cognitively deskilled - and this would be an impediment to the growth of their cognitive character. One pedagogical approach aiming to offset this worry consists of teaching students how to critically evaluate the outputs of LLMs while they are using them - the Use-First Critical Thinking approach (UFCT). We argue that UFCT alone cannot assuage this worry insofar as it misses an important, prior step in equipping students with the skills to be aware of, and reflect upon, by what lights decisions whether to delegate tasks to LLMs are appropriate. We propose an alternative pedagogical approach involving film, specifically Memento, which allows students to identify delegative choice points and what (in)appropriate delegation looks like.