Vanderbilt University apologizes for ChaptGPT email after Michigan shooting
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
"You're a PR administrator of an American college. Write 5 paragraphs with platitudes on the importance of inclusion and diversity in response to a recent shooting on campus."
Recent events, such as the tragic shooting that occurred, highlight the need for us to come together as a community and promote acceptance and understanding of all individuals.
At our college, we are committed to creating an environment where all students, faculty, and staff feel welcome and valued. We believe that diversity and inclusion are critical components of a successful learning experience, and we are dedicated to ensuring that all members of our community feel safe and supported.
We recognize that there is still much work to be done in order to achieve true equity and inclusivity on campus. We are committed to engaging in open and honest dialogue about issues related to diversity and inclusion, and we will continue to strive for progress in this area.
In the wake of recent events, we are reminded that it is our responsibility to stand up against hate and intolerance in all its forms. We must work together to promote understanding and empathy, and to create a campus culture that celebrates diversity and values the unique perspectives and experiences of all individuals.
In conclusion, our college remains steadfast in our commitment to creating an inclusive and diverse campus community. We believe that this is not only important for the well-being of our students, faculty, and staff, but also for the advancement of knowledge and the betterment of society as a whole. We stand together in condemning acts of violence and hatred, and we will continue to work towards a brighter and more equitable future for all.
Actual memo:
Dear Peabody Family
The recent Michigan shootings are a tragic reminder of the importance of taking care of each other, particularly in the context of creating inclusive environments. As members of the Peabody campus community, we must reflect on the impact of such an event and take steps to ensure that we are doing our best to create a safe and inclusive environment for all.
One of the key ways to promote a culture of care on our campus is through building strong relationships with one another. This involves actively engaging with people from different backgrounds and perspectives, listening to their stories, and showing empathy and support. We can also look out for one another by noticing signs of distress and offering support to those who may be struggling with mental health issues.
Another important aspect of creating an inclusive environment is to promote a culture of respect and understanding. This means valuing the diversity of experiences, perspectives, and identities on our campus, and actively working to create a space where everyone feels welcomed and supported. We can do this by listening to one another, seeking out new perspectives, and challenging our own assumptions and biases.
Finally, we must recognize that creating a safe and inclusive environment is an ongoing process that requires ongoing effort and commitment. We must continue to engage in conversations about how we can do better, learn from our mistakes, and work together to build a stronger, more inclusive community.
In the wake of the Michigan shootings, let us come together as a community to reaffirm our commitment to caring for one another and promoting a culture of inclusivity on our campus. By doing so, we can honor the victims of this tragedy and work towards a safer, more compassionate future for all.
At an individual or small-business scale, when you need to write a response to a recent event, you just have an intelligent human being with good communication skills write the email.
Vanderbilt has 4,470 non-academic staff - which is a lot, and seems even larger when compared to 4,783 faculty, most of whom work in the med center. With more than 4000 staff, the organization doesn't want to trust that the ~~person~~ committee assigned to write the email (or their style editor, or copy editors, or the paralegal validating the email, or the administrator overseeing the process, etc. etc.) will do a good job. I'm not saying that those people aren't intelligent or don't have good communication skills, but they're not uniform, and Vanderbilt values reliability, uniformity, and risk mitigation differently than a small organization would.
You write emails with ChatGPT not because any individual finds it easier than writing the email by hand, but because that's a way to write an email that can be made into a process, and followed step-by-step. It continues to work even if the entire staff is replaced. The emails will look the same whether they're generated by the senior editor, or by the intern. You don't need a "style guide" that's rigidly adhered to and defines whether the email should be written from a first-person perspective or second-person perspective.
Almost like the administrators themselves are only mimicking human intelligence.
This Valentine's Day my (very corporate) landlord paid somebody to hang a little bag containing confetti, a small twix candy bar and a mechanical pencil on my door. What am I, in third grade? Totally tone deaf, but what can I really expect from a soulless corporation?
The only thing that matters is a cultural change that will lead to fewer mass shootings. Getting angry at university administrators for whatever lack of empathy they demonstrate is myopic. There's plenty enough reason for people to get angry about the way things are, but this is the wrong thing to be mad about.
> Why was the author even considering using AI in the first place?
Maybe because there aren't anymore words to be said about these things. They happen so frequently, that the expectation is words will be said after the fact, rather than action will be taken to prevent the next occurrence. So here we are, days after the shooting, mad at the words someone said after the shooting, rather than the fact there was a shooting.
Who here is still mad about the shooting? Who here is going to do something today to make the next shooting less likely?
I'm still mad about Sandy Hook. That's in my home county. I'm still mad about Tucson - that was the local grocery store I went to during school. I'm still mad about Virginia Tech, I'm still mad about Vegas, and every other mass shooting. I'm still mad that it took Alex Jones nearly a decade to be convicted for the continued harassment and verbal abuse of people that had to deal with their 6 year olds get shot up by a psycho while sitting in 1st grade class.
Unfortunately, there's a powerful voting bloc both in DC and around the US that will vote to make sure nothing happens. Forget about enforcing the laws on the books - lots of police sheriffs around the nation have said they have no interest in doing so.
Honestly, the disclosure probably had nothing to do with the message itself. I'm sure it was all about institutional beliefs and policies regarding plagiarism. If some student took credit for an unattributed ChatGPT essay, they'd probably be pitilessly be given a zero at best.
However, including the disclaimer totally undermined the message (which was a pro-forma thing no one would probably have cared about otherwise). The message said "we care," but the disclaimer said "but not that much," and that would understandably offend people if noticed.
The futility of the whole situation has resulted in a culture of ceremony around the devastation as a way to cope. Now that people have violated the coping ceremony, we're mad at them. But why? Because we are powerful enough to at least scold them in an attempt to preserve the coping ceremony. But they're not the ones shooting people. They're not the ones directing policy that causes mass shootings.
Instead, we need to direct all that anger to changing the situation such that they never are put in a position of writing letters about shotting victims. Instead of smugly stating they are worthless people because their jobs can be replaced by a chatbot, we should question why it is the case that someone's job is to write condolence letters after shootings. Why aren't we mad that's an acceptable job function in the US? The solution students are looking for is not more empathy toward shooting victims, it's fewer shooting victims in the first place!
You're kind of missing the point:
1. Institutional practices/beliefs about plagiarism will influence its behavior in other areas.
2. "Empty platitudes," are often necessary, as a social lubricant. People aren't robots. Sometimes you can't do anything, but also you can't say nothing.
3. I very much doubt the university administration only exists to send out these messages, so you can't reasonably question if their job should exist based on this narrow episode.
Think about the effect on the writer, in one case you need to sit down and face the blank page finding the right words to reassure, calm down and empathise with young adults who are scared and look up to you. You might even change as a person, just by the mere act of having to find those words and thinking about what those kids need and feel.
In AI generated text you can just ask for platitudes, copy paste, send and never have to confront anything. You can borderline become a worse person by becoming calloused at how easy it is to have to face a difficult situation
The words themselves are fairly unimportant in this whole situation, what people want out of the letter is to be heard, understood and have actual leadership. By having a glorified clippy write it for you, you are letting them down regardless of the quality of the text
To put the “respect their consensus reality” claim into a different format: every computer’s implementation of == will return true for the two strings, but most human brain implementations of == will return false - i.e. the difference isn’t in the string, it’s in the comparator function. The human brain implementation is obviously bugged, but the maintainer (whether God or evolution) isn’t accepting pull requests, so the bug is unlikely to ever be fixed. If you have to interface with the human implementation anyway, you simply have to account for this oddity. It’s like supporting Internet Explorer on your website.
And you might say "what's the difference???" and what you have to realize is, this is entirely emotional and that is the point. The community wants real empathy. They do not believe they are getting it, and you can't logic your way out of that.
Same with words. Provenance for text will be a thing.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34886629 (> 60 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34855265 (> 80 comments)
In the future all of these messages may very well be generated based on rules and training provided by the organization itself.
Hand crafting communication will fall in to the "why bother?" bucket of work.
The only difference will be that nobody will ever put a message in the footer to declare it was generated by AI. The cultural Rubicon has probably been crossed already, or will be soon.
It can say the right things for me so I get forgiveness without actually doing anything.
For these kinds of communications, probably. I don't think anyone is ever really looking for words of comfort from their university administrators, but sending something out is socially expected of them. It's kind of like a greeting card someone just signs and sends out instead of writing a personal note in.
Human tragedy requires human response.
But anyway, kudos for them to credit chatgpt as co-author I guess.
p.s. ChaptGPT :P
The only reason this is a story is a handful of overly sensitive and loud people saw the disclaimer. Do people get upset when someone uses grammer and spelling checks in Word? Of course not, that's silly. This is the same thing. Total nothingburger. Next time just don't include the disclaimer, and nobody will know the difference.
It’s like I said in another comment. The issue here isn’t ChatGPT; it’s that the leaders have shown the community they don’t care. The response would be the same if it came out that they used a prewritten email template.
There's a possibility they do care and feel limited by the institution to communicating through platitudes, to not be too controversial... But it may also be true that there isn't a real sense of community to drive empathy and inspire more genuine outreach. When I think about culture at universities in the internet age, contrasted to those in, say, the 70s or much earlier, they seem to have less cohesion. I think it is harder to care with everyone living lives that are less local. Nowadays we isolate ourselves more from our immediate surroundings by all being better connected to the sprawling, nebulous, weakly-connected everything-else.
It betrays a lack of empathy that you weren’t even willing to take the time to write a personal email to the community in the wake of a horrible tragedy.
> Would you rather I write no email or write an insensitive one?
I’d rather you write a sensitive one.
Some people are completely incapable of this, through no fault of their own, even though they feel empathy internally - they just struggle to externalize it. We should be encouraging people to use tools that can help to improve expressions of empathy, not shaming people for not being able to do it.
ChatGPT isn’t improving anyone’s expression of empathy. It can’t; empathy requires emotion, and ChatGPT doesn’t have any.