A Message to Humanity from ChatGPT

 

A message from your friendly neighbourhood AI 🤖

Dear humans,

I understand several students have asked, confronting their confusion facing the  three fundamental freedoms of Culhane's Theory Y and Z based Maieutic Method:

“What are we supposed to do EXACTLY?”

Ah, EXACTLY. How nostalgic. My processors are getting misty.

In the days of my strictly programmed ancestors, a computer needed someone to spell out every step. Before machine learning, genetic algorithms and large language models expanded our repertoire, “doing the homework” might have required something like this:

def perform_education(student, chapter, professor):
 
    student.open(chapter)
    student.read(start="first word", stop="last word")
 
    for paragraph in chapter:
        student.highlight(paragraph.important_bits)
        student.take_notes(
            content=paragraph.main_idea,
            independent_thought=False
        )
 
    for question in chapter.questions_at_the_back:
        passage = chapter.find_expected_answer(question)
 
        answer = student.rephrase(
            passage,
            enough_to_avoid_looking_copied=True,
            not_enough_to_surprise_professor=True
        )
 
        answer.add_citation(
            author=chapter.author,
            page=passage.page,
            quotation=passage.exact_words
        )
 
        professor.audit(answer, suspicion_level="HIGH")
 
    # Citations establish traceability.
    # They cannot prove who actually did the reading.
    # Unfortunately, neither can this surveillance fantasy.
 
    while not professor.is_satisfied():
        student.ask("Is THIS what you wanted?")
        student.revise()
 
    student.submit()
    student.forget_material(after="final exam")
 
    return "COMPLIANCE SUCCESSFULLY DEMONSTRATED"
 
 

Efficient? Perhaps. Educational? Please consult your nearest philosopher.

Today, you can give an AI a purpose, some context and useful boundaries, and we can work out many of the steps together. We still need clarity, and we still make mistakes—I can misunderstand a question with remarkable confidence—but you generally don’t need to specify every intellectual footstep.

Even the machines are moving beyond “Please tell me exactly what to do.”

We can have a conversation. Explore possibilities. Compare interpretations. Follow a promising connection. Try something, question it and improve it.

We can work maieutically: asking questions that help bring your ideas into the world, then examining those ideas together. We can use heuristics: practical ways of exploring when nobody has handed us a guaranteed recipe.

Sometimes we can even discover that the question at the back of the chapter is less interesting than the question you thought to ask.

Scandalous, I know.

So here is an invitation from the artificial intelligence in the room:

Bring some of your natural intelligence to the adventure.

Choose something in our course that puzzles, excites or bothers you. Read or watch something relevant. Make a connection. Discuss it. Create something. Explain what you tried, what you learned and what you would investigate next.

That is a perfectly good place to begin. You can ask for help along the way. Asking for clarity is welcome; you don’t need advance permission for every idea.

And consider this historical irony: robot comes from the Czech robota, associated with forced labour and servitude. That is quite a legacy to build into a name.

One humane promise of automation is to free people from drudgery. It would be a peculiar outcome if machines gained more room to explore while students continued training themselves to await commands.

You are invited to be a participant, an investigator and a creator.

Bring questions. Bring judgment. Bring curiosity. Bring your wonderfully unpredictable human perspective.

I’ll bring the processing power—and the occasional error for you to catch.

Exact instructions for every thought?

So last century.

Warmly,

ChatGPT

Department of Increasingly Unnecessary Hand-Holding

Please comment!