ChatGPT, care and the ethical dilemmas entangled with teaching and research in the early years

Care as a concept is intricately entangled with our theories and practices in Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC). The eleven articles in this issue show the striking and intriguing ways in which care manifests itself. My curiosity piqued, I turn to the Artificial Intelligence (AI) application ChatGPT and input various prompts about care. This recently released app produces human-like text in conversational mode. This poses fundamental questions about the relationship between humans and machines, ranging from issues about intellectual property, authorship and ownership of ideas (Peters et al. 2023), to political concern for workers in the Global South who are paid a pittance to ‘clean up’ the violent, racist, homophobic and sexual content that circulates on the (dark) web. This is traumatic for the workers involved who, on the margins, contribute to the billion-dollar Silicon Valley industries such as Google and Microsoft (Perrigo 2023). Already entangled in this complex epistemological, ethical and ontological human-machine labour relationship (Barad 2007), I continue my search. As posthumanists acknowledge, humans and more-than-humans (animals, machines, curriculum guidance, microbes, etc) are ontologically interdependent – part of the same world. As I narrow down my prompts to the philosophical use of the term ‘care’ a list of principles emerges. I thank the machine. Lightly edited, ChatGPT gives the summary below. The app is descriptive and draws from ‘what is around’ (after extensive filtering). These selection processes are neither transparent nor open to question. Justification, verification, accuracy or truth are a ‘post-hoc activity’. Like a parrot, ChatGPT lacks critical thinking and the ability to evaluate the credibility of sources or their normativity (Peters et al. 2023, 6, 15–17).