In a little over a month is the beginning of the new school year. One of the hot topics up for discussion on university campuses around the world (but most especially in the US) will be the so-called “proper use” of ChatGPT.By all means enter the conversation, but intentionally resist the use of techno-utilitiarian language. When an administer–however well-meaning–frames the discussion in techno-utilitarian terms, e.g., “how best to use information,” do not comply. Instead, employ phrases like “seeking the truth,” “avoiding the false,” “loving the beautiful,” and “practicing the just.” For once you acquiesce to the language of the utilitarian managerial class, you become a participant in your eventual obsolesce as well as the destruction of the humane and the lovely. Education is more than about technical proficiency, though it is certainly not less than that.
In this dystopic future, clever, insightful, prose vanishes, except when ChatGPT steals it from Shakespeare, George Carlin, James Baldwin, Bob Dylan, Jane Austen, or perhaps you. Do not cooperate with mindless machines in the theft of genius for the establishing of an Idiocracy.
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