AI&Human: Creative Collaboration (pt.3) - What's your moat?
- Jo Szoke
- Feb 25
- 3 min read
Updated: Mar 25
To hype you up for our book called "AI Literacy in the Language Classroom" with Zsofi Menyhei that's published soon and for our workshop at IATEFL on April 8, I'm going to run a multi-part series of posts with creative human-AI collaboration ideas. Here's part 3 that was inspired by a post by Amelia King, Director of Edtech&Innovation at Dulwich College Shanghai.
Amelia's post mentioned the concept of "moats" in connection with AI. You wonder what a moat is and how it makes sense in this context? Let's see what's going on!
Basically, your moat are your unique human qualities that separate you from the slop and make you irreplaceable by AI. By the way, slop was one of the runners up for Word of the Year in the Oxford Dictionary in 2024.
I was excited to see this concept because it works perfectly with my current talks and workshops in connection with human & AI collaboration and co-existence. It's important to see that AI is definitely here to stay, and it's gaining more and more power and knowledge to potentially replace many tasks and perhaps even jobs. But can it replace teachers?
I asked around in a Facebook group for English teachers in Hungary to see what they think about AI and whether they have any negative thoughts or opinions in connection with it. I specifically wanted to check if they worry about them being replaced by AI technology in the near future.
It was surprising to see how confident they were in their responses, while my personal conversations with teachers from across Europe at the Erasmus teacher training courses I regularly deliver showed something different. Many of the course participants said that they worried about how much AI is capable of right now and what their role was going to be from now on. I believe Hungarian teachers' overconfidence might come from a lack of complete understanding of what AI can actually do, but it's just a hunch.
But think about it, what is your moat? What makes you special? How are you going to adapt your teaching to this new AI-dominated era?
These are going to be the questions that I'm bringing to the NYESZE Conference in Hungary on April 5 and to the TDSIG Pre-Conference Event in Edinburgh on April 7.
To fully understand what's going to make you unique and irreplaceable, first you need to comprehend what AI can do now:
It can generate gazillion activities and materials, such as reading or listening texts. True, they are generic, mediocre, and lack human zest, but many AI-powered language learning apps are already satisfied with this average quality, and many language learners are also willing to pay less for such apps instead of committing themselves to a real human teacher.
It can adapt to each student's learning curve and generate materials and activities accordingly. Again, these materials might lack a soul but the process is much quicker than a human teacher's workflow, so many companies consider going for such solutions.
AI agents can autonomously go through entire e-learning courses and solve them as if they were real humans, which shows a huge leak in the e-learning and MOOC business. So far, online courses and certificates have meant something, at least you could put them on your Linkedin profile. But now, how will the course coordinator or leader know who solved the activities. This basically signals that all asynchronous courses need significant redesigns. More on this can be found in Philippa Hardman's post.
This means that we need to look at what separates us from the slop and how we're going to make ourselves stand the test of time. These are some of these qualities that came out from a conversation I had with my lovely AI-assistant, Claude:
Emotional intelligence
Relationship building and social intelligence
Adaptability and learning agility
Interdisciplinary thinking
Ethical reasoning
Metacognitive capabilities = thinking about how they use AI
Information discernment
What do you think? What's your moat?
Comments