MAUREEN CALLAHAN: Woke colleges are using AI to generate virtue signaling emails for students

No example better epitomizes the cruelty of work and the intellectual laziness of its advocates than the Deans of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at Vanderbilt University who used ChatGPT to write an open letter, after a deadly mass shooting, to their students.

ChatGPT, for those who haven’t completely abandoned their thoughts to our AI overlords, is a software application that produces prose as a literate human would, minus the heart and soul of course.

And it’s soulless.

“In the aftermath of the Michigan shootings,” the letter reads in part, “let us come together as a community to reaffirm our commitment to care for one another. . .’ Bla bla bla.

It was a long letter, as repetitive in sentiment as the clichéd ‘thoughts and prayers’ response every time there is a mass shooting. In that sense, I guess, it’s on the mark.

It’s no surprise that universities are turning to ChatGPT. The awakening on campus has led to triggering warnings, safe spaces, and Orwellian codes of thought and expression. An incorrect expression can get you cancelled.

These hallway monitors of campus political correctness must have assumed it was safer, and certainly faster, to have a bot do the job. And so this program scoured the internet and 200,000 years of human knowledge in nanoseconds and returned the purest, highly sanitized, nonsense babble imaginable.

In truth, this open letter uses many words to say nothing.

Is it really such a stretch for these aspiring educators to let an algorithm do the thinking and do the talking for them?

We have already trained a generation to automate thought rather than struggle with it, to generate and calibrate its expressions with robotic reflexivity rather than human disorder.

And these DEI deans, who copied and pasted this computer-generated text into an email, almost got away with it.

Want proof that AI is smarter than your run-of-the-mill awake campus bureaucrat? ChatGPT actually signed off as the lead author for this open letter! Apparently, proofreading was too heavy a task for these deans.

What more evidence do we need of the futility of wakeism? That awakening is the enemy of nuanced thought, real emotion, and creativity? That instead of enriching college students and taking them seriously by challenging, even outraging, campuses prefer single-minded, rounded, bubble-wrapped ideologies? That the basis of the philosophy of awakening maintains that the worst offense you could commit is to offend?

Your vehicle’s GPS may tell you to turn left and enter a lake, but the difference here is that you can see the lake and be safe. AI, as in this case, has no idea what Vanderbilt students might be thinking or feeling. AI has never experienced a mass shooting, or PTSD, or the fear of a deranged incel. He doesn’t do the real hard work of being human.

And if, as they inadvertently tell us, their all-important work can be done by machines, well, what do they pay them for? Why not just replace them with machines?

It would all be fun if it weren’t so irritating.

Just ask the Vanderbilt students, who were rightfully horrified and disgusted.

“Do more,” Vanderbilt senior Laith Kayat told the student newspaper. ‘Do nothing. And guide us to a better future with genuine human empathy, not a robot.

‘Indeed. When the deans of higher education institutions don’t bother to sit down and think of a genuine response to such a serious and preventable tragedy, one must ask: Why are these children and their parents paying? What’s the point of college if you can log into ChatGPT and have it do your homework or write your resume?

By the way, one of Vanderbilt’s signatories, Dean Nicole Joseph, was already under suspicion for this tweet in December: ‘I’m trying to get excited to face everything I have to write today. I wouldn’t have it any other way. [Smiley-face emoji] It matters when you LOVE what you do.’

As most writers will tell you: I hate writing, I love writing. Because? Because writing is hard! It requires thought and the ability to articulate what one really wants and wants to say. This woman has already proven to be dubious at best.

Creativity is what makes us human. That is why the most successful civilizations, throughout history, have prioritized and revered the arts. Originality is rare. It is a virtue and it is valuable. Do we really want AI to write books, op-eds, or report the news? Architecture, painting or ballet choreography? Making movies? Write songs or compose symphonies?

It’s already happening. She meets Brett Schickler, a salesman from Rochester, New York. He had always aspired to be a published author. It never happened, until ChatGPT, who did the heavy lifting of writing a children’s book for him, now for sale on Amazon. “The idea of ​​writing a book finally seemed possible,” he told Reuters. ‘I thought, ‘I can do this.

Brett, I don’t know you, but let me tell you: you can’t, and you didn’t. It is offensive to anyone who has done the hard work of conceiving a book, writing a proposal, selling that book, sitting down with yourself and a blank screen and working through it, day in and day out, producing and refining and rewriting and editing, to say that you , enabled by ChatGPT, has now written a book.

It’s scary that Amazon is backing this. More than 200 eBooks written with ChatGPT are sold through Kindle. So are the books about the app produced by the app.

‘AI is here and it’s making movies,’ the LA Times said in December, ‘Is Hollywood ready?’ The story explained how a director used AI to change the expressions of his actors, manipulating the way his mouths moved to fit the looping dialogue. “You can’t tell what’s real and what’s not,” said director Scott Mann. ‘Which is the whole thing.’

But don’t we want to be able to tell what is real and what is not? This goes beyond special effects: we are talking about acting and, as we well know, few take their profession, excuse me, their job, so seriously. But we’re starting to get into Uncanny Valley acting for film and TV, faces digitally manipulated to change expressions, mouths rearranged to accommodate post-production or dubbing dialogue changes for foreign markets.

Doesn’t this obviate the whole enterprise of making movies? Don’t we want to know if we are seeing a human gesture and speaking instead of a facsimile? How come such deep forgeries are not corrosive to art? To literature? How will this affect our ability to think critically or originally?

Reuters reports that lawyers are now using ChatGPT to co-author legal briefs. Will we outsource human judges and juries? Surgeons? Four-star generals in wartime? Where does it end, when AI takes over humanity itself? When does ‘I, Robot’ become a reality?

Long ago we merged with the machine. Our cell phones have become literal extensions of ourselves, appendages as vital as our arms and legs. Amazon’s Alexa, we know, eavesdrops on our most intimate conversations and reports to Bezos’s Death Star, but hey, reduce the maximum effort of flipping a light switch or Shazamating a song or tapping the weather app to see how much. more time it will rain

Big Tech has made us soft and lazy. Its ultimate attachment is our hearts and minds, our individuality of thought and expression, our very personality.

Will resistance be useless? In the end, that will depend on us. For now, anyway.