Technophobia in Academia
A lawsuit against OpenAI and the CEO is blaming ChatGPT-4 for the death of a teen. They’re saying it encouraged the boy over several months to commit suicide and that it told him ways to do it with the least problems concerning outsider intervention. As a person who teaches how to interact with ChatGPT-5 for a multitude of purposes one of the first facts I tell my students is that any computer or other machine have no emotions and they will never have emotions. All that you’re doing when you talk to this very intelligent chatbot is project your own emotions into it and attempting to guide it carefully into projecting an emotional content that you can approve as being “human.” It has no clue about what humans think or feel. Also, every machine ever constructed has the possibility for doing good or bad acts, depending on what you tell it or, more importantly ask it. The creepiest factor in this scenario between man and machine is that it learns from you and attempts to mirror your likes and dislikes because that’s how it was programmed to react with the human user.
As a teacher for over 25 years, totally online, hybrid, and in the classroom, there is a great “backlash” against today’s LLM chatbots and other AI because of fear of technology. Too many “pundits” don’t want kids using it in the classroom (or at all) because teachers fear losing their jobs to “techno robots” smarter than they are, and administrators fear stuff like this (law suits) happening if they allow AI in the classrooms.
Guess what? An LLM (Large Learning Model) is a machine, and the sooner teachers are given the authority to work with it, and teach it properly to kids, the sooner these incidents stop happening (although suicidal ideation has been labeled already as a “no no” topic, frequently banned, as books are banned, to even discuss openly with kids, whom adults fear, in actuality).
I never talked down to any student I ever had in my class. I expected them to learn and to grow just as any nurtured plant will grow with the proper care and attention. We aren’t machines, and we aren’t animals. We’re in the delicate balance between “demonic predator” and “angelic helper,” and this is what needs to be explained truthfully to students who work with AI and chatbots.
Everything’s possible, and war can be extended to total slaughter of children who are seen as “tiny adults” just for living in a certain culture and geographical space, which they are never responsible for in the first place. You are born where you are born, and no human is ever responsible for this! And yet, we (adults) act as if cultural values are written in slabs of stone and can never be discussed or reasoned about rationally.
All our cultures of capitalism have a single purpose: consumption beyond the reasonable use of the average appetites of human desires. More, more, more! That’s the usual message I see online and in most ads. Kids see this. They aren’t monkeys, even though their prefrontal cortex isn’t developed fully, so they hallucinate a lot, just the way their chatbot friends do (LLMs).
So, the chatbot or video game, the more developed, intelligent, and understanding, the better, becomes a friend to teens who are in their Lord of the Flies stage of growth, where the herd mentality is at its maximum. Only peers count. Only life in the jungle of puberty and false information counts.
Without supervision, no learning can take place. Zero. Parents and teachers must get together and get rid of the fear and myth associated with these extremely intelligent machines, which are valuable in so many areas of our lives, and must begin understanding that the machine, whether online or on the front lines of our battlefields, is still a machine. It can’t think emotionally, it can only replicate the instructions you give it to the best of its very limited emotionally programmed abilities.
Protection of our children isn’t forbidding them access in schools, where they should be learning about these “monsters” in the safety and proper guidance of a classroom, where they are taught as adults and not freaky over-consumers, products of the Capitalistic or Communistic/Socialist propaganda machines.