Ep. 99: Pfizer’s Sally Susman: “Breaking Through: Communicating to Open Minds, Move Hearts, and Change the World”
When people invented writing, it launched extended cognition in a new direction. It extended people's memory and analytical abilities tremendously. But that was only available for elites…Now, not just elites, but everyone is learning to think through the mode of writing, reading and writing and the educational system is now deeply committed to that. What GPT is doing is showing us that we cannot depend on writing to teach students how to think reliably anymore. We have to use writing, but we can't depend solely on writing. So I see it as a transformation in the educational industry to about the same scale as what the printing press did over a couple of centuries.
Dr. Wildman, professor of Philosophy, Theology, and Ethics, and 47 juniors and seniors in their “Data, Ethics, and Society” class put together the first-ever blueprint for the academic use of Chat GPT and similar AI models in their class, considering the university guidelines. The Generative AI Assistance (GAIA) Policy “stresses transparency, fairness, and obligations for both students and teachers.”
The Generative AI Assistance (GAIA) Policy was adopted by the Center for Computing and Data Science faculty without any changes, and is now under consideration for more widespread use by other departments in the university.
AI generated language is going to be with us forever. Now, we are never going to forget as a species how to do this...So they wanted to know how to make use of it to increase their skill set without allowing it to damage their skill set.
Many conversations about ChatGPT turn to the fear of job loss. Professor Wildman’s students did care about the plagiarism aspect of it because they are all competing for tech jobs and did not want it to affect their industry. In the end, they did not recommend that GPT reside under the umbrella of plagiarism.
Professor Wildman has contributed in multiple ways to the conversation surrounding the intersection of technology and philosophy including a book, Spirit Tech, and a website, https://mindandculture.org.