with ChatGPT

Abstract

For this Choux Questionnaire, we turned to ChatGPT, the generative AI chatbot. Given the challenges and opportunities that AI presents to academic practice, teaching, and writing, we thought it might be intriguing to use these responses as a means to interpret ChatGPT’s ‘perspectives’ on food through our own. Both the process and outcomes of conducting the questionnaire provided occasions to reflect on the underlying technology, its sources of ‘knowledge’, and its apparent biases. In reading the bot’s words below, a fairly distinct character profile might emerge, as well as a kind of positionality that seems connected to both no place and every place at once. Beyond social and physical geographies, a set of privileges also tends to emerge, one that points to a lack of actual, lived experience. Where are the preferences, quirks, and affect that non-artificial intelligence comprises? Where are the outlier and emotional responses that would make one want to share food or ideas with this being? From your perspective as food scholar, practitioner, eater, or activist, what else do you extrapolate from ChatGPT’s ‘voice’?