Teaching with ChatGPT: Critiquing Generative Artificial Intelligence from the Classroom

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes1. Over the past few years, these technologies each had moments of promise. Facebook rebranded to Meta to hype up “the metaverse”—an immersive virtual world—as the successor to the internet. One of the presumed technologies enabling the metaverse was the blockchain, whose best-known application is cryptocurrency. NFTs experienced a bubble of interest and also served to inflate crypto, because NFTs are blockchain technologies. Significantly, because these three technologies are interlocking, as one faltered (for example, the crypto exchange FTX’s bankruptcy), they all faltered. It was amidst this floundering that generative AI began making a splash.2. Lisa Messeri, In the Land of the Unreal: Virtual and Other Realities in Los Angeles (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, Still forthcoming).3. James Vincent, “Watch Jordan Peele Use AI to Make Barack Obama Deliver a PSA about Fake News,” The Verge, April 17, 2018. https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2018/4/17/17247334/ai-fake-news-video-barack-obama-jordan-peele-buzzfeed4. https://chat.openai.com/ accessed August 3, 2023.5. Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora, Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019).6. Emily M. Bender, Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major, and Shmargaret Shmitchell, “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?,” in Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, FAccT ‘21 (New York: Association for Computing Machinery, 2021), 610–623. https://doi.org/10.1145/3442188.34459227. Dan McQuillan, “ChatGPT: The World’s Largest Bullshit Machine,” Transforming Society, February 10, 2023. https://www.transformingsociety.co.uk/2023/02/10/chatgpt-the-worlds-largest-bullshit-machine/8. Ian Bogost, “The First Year of AI College Ends in Ruin,” The Atlantic, May 16, 2023. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/05/chatbot-cheating-college-campuses/674073/; Christopher DeLuca, Don A. Klinger, and Louis Volante, “ChatGPT and Cheating: 5 Ways to Change How Students Are Graded,” The Conversation, February 27, 2023, http://theconversation.com/chatgpt-and-cheating-5-ways-to-change-how-students-are-graded-200248; Owen Kichizo Terry, “I’m a Student. You Have No Idea How Much We’re Using ChatGPT,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 12, 2023. https://www.chronicle.com/article/im-a-student-you-have-no-idea-how-much-were-using-chatgpt; Suzy Weiss, “Dishonor Code: What Happens When Cheating Becomes the Norm?,” The Free Press, February 28, 2023. https://www.thefp.com/p/dishonor-code-what-happens-when-cheating9. Leo Marx, “‘Technology’: The Emergence of a Hazardous Concept,” Social Research 64, no. 3 (1997): 965–988.Additional informationNotes on contributorsLisa MesseriLisa Messeri is an assistant professor of anthropology at Yale University. She researches the practices and imaginaries of contemporary scientists and innovators, interested in how their work impacts how we understand what it means to be human and what it means to be in the world. Her first book, Placing Outer Space, explores how planetary scientists and exoplanetary astronomers transform planets from scientific objects into places and worlds. Her forthcoming book, In the Land of the Unreal, weaves together the fantasies and technologies that enliven the virtual reality community in Los Angeles.