College deans suspended after ChatGPT used to email students about mass shooting
dailymail.co.uk
dailymail.co.uk
- Deans are paid a lot. Our dean make a quarter mil.
- Mass shooting emails should _probably_ have a human touch.
- Heck, any human tragedy email should _probably_ have a human touch.
- Does the university want to pay the Dean to write emails?
- Does the Dean want to write emails?
- What is the Dean doing for a quarter mil a year?
- Probably playing around with ChatGPT?
- For a quarter mil a year, could we not hire a bunch of grads to study GPTs?
Q1. Why was the service down for so long? A1: Because the on-call engineer didn't respond to the pager
Q2: Why didn't the on-call engineer respond? A2: Because they're exhausted from being on-call so often since the team was downsized
Q3: Why was the team downsized? A3: Because the manager's manager's manager is reducing headcount this year?
Q4: Why is the manager's manager's manager reducing headcount? A4: Because they're trying to bring the departments spend down for the year
Q5: Why are they trying to bring the spend down? A5: Because they know their boss, the CTO, is interviewing at the moment. And the CFO is golf buddies with the CEO, and the CFO is always going on about improving efficiency. So if the manager's manager's manager can reduce spend this year it'll look really efficient to the CFO, and maybe they can line-up that CTO role when their boss leaves.
(sarcasm?)
It's not like executives are where they're at because of some exceptional skill.
250k is a decent salary, but not really a lot in this day and age. Especially for the head of such a large organization.
Personally I think it was motivated by trying to create a marketed feeling of exclusivity , drive a stake between Those With and Those Without, and alienate those without into buying an iProduct and joining The Club.
One reason I feel that way is that the only time I'd see it in a work context is if it's a phishing email.
No one really cares where I’m at. I have my laptop signature set to:
Thanks,
Kayodé
$NAME
$RANK
$SERIALNUMBER
My phone signature is the iPhone default. Just like everyone else.
I’m grateful the default Mail sig works as a graceful catch-all rather than fitting in an awkward mea culpa in the body or (worse) slapping in some boilerplate sig that might as well read “this email is unreliable and so am I” to certain types of people.
Of course, humans expect honest and sincere communication in times of grief and not automated responses, so that's on the Deans for making poor decisions (just as poor as it would be to hire a PR firm to compose something for them --it probably happens but just does not get announced)
[0] https://filteroutai.com/validate/114ddca7445e6b5119715111623...
They seem to be overstaffed, if it took four people and an AI to write the memo.
I can’t think of a context where I would be upset about receiving a letter written by AI from uni administration/company/government, but I also use tools like CharGPT to help me communicate myself.
There is a widespread cultural assumption that important messages should be delivered as personally as reasonably possible. People think that it shows proper respect and that the matter is important to you. In contrast, if you choose a more impersonal way of delivery, it signals that the topic is not particularly important to you as a person.
Many people already think that emails like this are performative bullshit. If it's actual bullshit written by a bullshit generator, it's going to look even worse.
Those Deans should be fired.
1. Is it possible that some tool was used which caused the 'citation' at the end was not visible to the person who sent the email? It appears to be an automatically generated thing. It would be much stranger if someone typed it out like that intentionally.
2. Much more cynically, there is otherwise nothing controversial about the email. Clearly ChatGPT is suitable for writing non-controversial platitudes like this. This news story is guerilla marketing targeted at lazy college deans.
is a better link.
Wouldn’t someone start by creating some basic points about what they want to express and then edit the response?
Isn’t ChatGPT supposed to be a “jumping off point” for these kinds of thing?
Are people mad because the author was transparent about their use of editing tool? Should the Dean have been less transparent? I don’t put in my correspondence that I use spelling and grammar checks in Word, so why would you say you used ChatGPT?
The dean who wrote this message doesn’t care about the students. She doesn’t know them. She’s fulfilling a role where she acts as a figurehead that students can project feelings of compassion onto. Like any other job, this one also involves some degree of drudgery, such as writing emails like this. It’s good that ChatGPT can make her life easier by automating that task. Her actual fault was accidentally admitting to it and ruining her image as a figurehead, which is her actual job. But if you’re looking for a referendum on the dangers of ChatGPT on society or something, this story isn’t it.
When I receive a communication from a senior official, my expectations are as follows:
1) the communication was probably written by someone else 2) the contents of the communication were reviewed and approved by the senior official
If either of the associate deans (or a responsible intermediary, on behalf of the associate deans) had reviewed the communication, they would have made a note to remove the mention of ChatGPT. The outrage is completely justified, yet the communication itself would have been acceptable, if a human had written it.
We should let this moment of outrage pass. Whether the junior person is prompting an AI model or copy-pasting the best bits from previous communications, the senior person's role remains unchanged.
It's like cursive writing is not taught any more. Because things move on in technology.
AI is the way of the future. We should all take full advantage of it in any circustance.
My guess is these deans too are heavily on the spectrum.
Many times in my life what seemed normal and okay to me, was severely offensive to others. It's a cross I have to bear.