Modern Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines: Teaching students to think, learn, and thrive in a ChatGPT world
In the three years since ChatGPT3 was released, large language models (LLMs) have become integrated into countless technology platforms, transformed our information environments, and disrupted the ways we teach and the ways our students learn. These systems are so powerful that it sometimes feels as though humanity had been gifted with an alien technology or a magical talisman.
Suddenly we all had a new form of intelligence that we could employ to make our everyday tasks easier. But as Ted Underwood has observed:
“As in any fairytale, accepting magical assistance comes with risks.”
After speaking with hundreds of university students, professors, and administrators, Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West designed the course that we think every college freshman needs to take in order to manage these risks.
Their free online course, Modern Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines, is a course in the humanities. It’s a course about what it means to be human in a world where LLMs are becoming ubiquitous, offering a dialectic framework in which students can explore the benefits and the harms of ChatGPT and other LLM assistants.
They want to help them grapple with the contradictions inherent in this new technology, and allow them to forge their own understanding of what it means to be a student, a thinker, and a scholar in a generative AI world.
In this talk, Carl provides an overview of the course, discuss the issues that arose during its development, and consider our role as educators in an LLM world.
About the presenter
Prof. Carl Bergstrom
Carl Bergstrom is a Professor of Biology at the University of Washington and a faculty member at the UW Center for an Informed Public.
Trained in evolutionary biology, mathematical population genetics, and epidemiology, Carl is perhaps best known for crossing field boundaries and integrating ideas across the span of the natural and social sciences.
The unifying theme that runs through all of Carl’s work is the concept of information. Within biology, he studies problems such as how communication evolves, how animals deal with deception, and how the process of evolution by natural selection creates the information that is encoded in genomes.
In the philosophy and sociology of science, he studies how the incentives created by scientific institutions shape scholars’ research strategies and, in turn, our scientific understanding of the world.
In physics and network science, he explores how to extract the relevant information from massive networks comprising tens of millions of nodes, and how information flows through networks of this scale.
Within informatics, he studies how citations and other traces of scholarly activity can be used to better navigate the overwhelming volume of scholarly literature.
Within epidemiology, he studies the interaction between evolutionary and epidemiological processes in the emergence of infectious disease, the role of disease surveillance including rapid testing, and the effects of disinformation on public health.
Carl is the author of the college textbook Evolution (W.W. Norton).
Over the past decade, Carl has teamed up with Jevin West on a series of educational projects focused on quantitative reasoning and information literacy. Together they have developed a high-profile educational website (callingbull.org), course materials used at over 100 colleges and universities, and the popular book Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World (Random House). Their most recent project is a free online course for college freshmen about how to learn and thrive in a ChatGPT world, entitled Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines?