I wanted to spend some time thinking through the fear and loathing ChatGPT generates in the academy and what lies behind it. As such, this post is less a well written essay than it is a cocktail party of ideas and observations waiting for a thesis statement to arrive.
Rational Concerns
While I have already mentioned (and will mention again below), the academy tends to be a conservative place. We change slowly because the approach we take has worked for a long time.
A very long time.
When I say a long time, some of the works by Aristotle that are studied in Philosophy classes are his lecture notes. I would also note we insist on dressing like it is winter in Europe several hundred years ago — even when commencement is taking place in the summer heat of the American south.
While faculty have complained about prior technological advances (as well as how hot it gets in our robes), large language models are different. Prior advances -- say, the calculator/abacus or spell check -- have focused on automating mechanical parts of a process. While spell check can tell you how to spell something, you have to be able to approximate the word you want for the machine to be able to help you.
ChatGPT not only spells the words. it can provide them
In brief, it threatens to do the thinking portion for its user.
Now, in truth, it is not doing the thinking. It is replicating prior thought by predicting the next word based on what people have written in the past. This threatens to replace the hard part of writing -- the generation of original thought -- with its simulacrum.
Thinking is hard. It's tiring.it requires practice.
Writing is one of the places where it can be practiced.
The disturbing thing about pointing out that this generation of simulacra by students, however, is that too many of our assignments ask students to do exactly that. Take, for example, an English professor who gives their students a list of five research topics to choose from.
Whatever the pedagogical advantages and benefits of such an approach, it is difficult to argue that such an assignment is not asking the student to create such a simulacrum of what they think their professor wants rather than asking them to generate their own thoughts on a topic that they are passionate about.
It is an uncomfortable question to have to answer: How is what I am asking of the students truly beneficial and what is the "value add" that the students receive from completing it instead of asking ChatGPT to complete it?
Irrational Concerns
As I have written about elsewhere, faculty will complain about anything that changes their classroom. The massive adjustments the COVID-19 pandemic forced on the academy produced much walling and gnashing of teeth as we were dragged from the 18th Century into the 21st. Many considered retirement rather than having to learn and adjust.
Likewise, the story of the professor who comes to class with lecture notes, discolored by age and unupdated since their creation, is too grounded in reality to be ignored here. (Full disclosure: I know I have canned responses, too. For each generation of students, the questions are new -- no matter how many times I have answered them before.)
Many of us simply do not wish to change.
Practical Concerns
Learning how to use ChatGPT, and thinking through its implications takes time and resources. Faculty Development (training, for those in other fields -- although it is a little more involved than just training) is often focused in other areas -- the research that advances our reputations, rank, and career.
Asking faculty to divert their attention to ChatGPT when they have an article to finish is a tough sell. It is potentially a counter-productive activity depending on where in your career you are.