Building a Relationship with ChatGPT
Stephanie Bartlett
University of Calgary
When you were young, did you ever imagine that you would be contemplating whether or not to befriend artificial intelligence as part of your work?
While I didn’t imagine that I would really find myself in this position (somehow, my mind persistently kept it in the far-off future), conversations about innovative technology are not new in any way. So here I am. Face to face with ChatGPT contemplating whether or not we could be friends, so to speak.
I wanted to share my musings here to add to the broader conversation about ChatGPT and education, and to do so through the lens of my work and research with kinship and land-practice, an area that couldn’t be more different than the cutting edge technology of artificial intelligence (AI).
Similar to my work and research — and perhaps contrary to the idea of thoughts generated by a robot — this discussion will not be linear and my thoughts may or may not seem connected. Bear with me as we travel together…it will all come together at the end of the post. First, I’ll share a bit about me so that you know where I am coming from.
I am a cis-gendered white woman with Scottish and English ancestry who lives on traditional Blackfoot lands and comes from Coast Salish territory. I am a PhD candidate in curriculum and learning with a focus on land and kinship. I am also an educator and an entrepreneur who guides others to walk a path of reconciliation that involves building relationships with all kin, human and more-than-human.
You might ask why I shared such a lengthy introduction in a post about whether or not to adopt ChatGPT and here is where our conversation really begins…
Respectfully, my work is relational. It centres Indigeneity and kinship with all beings so that we can find nourishing ways to sustain life on earth for future generations. Guided by an Elder, I walk this journey with humility as I share my lived experiences with others. While I cannot transform anyone other than myself and my own practice, I hope that others might be inspired to think differently about their personal and professional lives in ways that centre kinship with all beings as a pathway towards reconciliation. There is an ethic of care in my learning journey that I need to cultivate and pay attention to as a non-Indigenous person engaging in this work.
At every point in my personal and professional life, I make an effort to slow down, to resist the status quo, to question, to decolonize, and to honour unique and diverse perspectives. I was concerned that if I were to seek information from ChatGPT, would that lead to a homogeneous response that is generated by AI?
I decided to begin by asking ChatGPT about my area of research:
Stephanie: What is a pedagogy of kinship?
ChatGPT: A pedagogy of kinship is an approach to teaching and learning that emphasizes the connections and relationships between people, communities, and the natural world. It is a way of seeing the world that acknowledges the interconnectedness of all things and recognizes the importance of building relationships based on trust, respect, and care.
In a pedagogy of kinship, education is viewed as a collaborative and reciprocal process that involves listening, sharing, and learning from one another. Teachers and learners are seen as partners in a shared journey of discovery and growth, rather than as separate entities with distinct roles and responsibilities.
Central to this pedagogy is the idea of building and sustaining relationships. This includes fostering a sense of belonging and connectedness within the classroom and creating opportunities for learners to connect with the wider community and natural world. It also involves developing an ethic of care that values and respects the diversity of people, cultures, and ecosystems.
Overall, a pedagogy of kinship recognizes that education is not just about acquiring knowledge and skills, but is also about building relationships, developing a sense of responsibility, and working together to create a more just and sustainable world (Chat GPT, personal communication, February 22, 2023).
At first glance, this response is sufficient. It mentions reciprocity, relationships, and responsibility. These are important considerations within Indigenous research methodologies and pedagogies (Kirkness and Barnhardt, 1991). Alongside these concepts, ChatGPT also shared that trust, care, connections, community, and ethics are important.
And yet, at the same time, there is something missing both in tone and language. Upon contemplation, this was slippery and hard to grasp to define exactly what didn’t feel quite right. As someone who has spent years learning, teaching, experiencing a pedagogy of kinship, I landed on the idea that the response is lacking nuance and lived experience. Would everybody be able to detect that lack? No, I don’t think so. And this may be something to pay attention to: the response seems adequate. I think this brings a worry to the surface that I have been trying to articulate. If we are looking to learn about a topic and then use ChatGPT as a source, this could contribute to a further colonization of knowledge, bringing people to a homogeneous understanding of a topic that is generated from AI, which presumably holds a dominant Western worldview, although I stand corrected if that is not the case.
One more bit to pay attention to was the language. As a scholar of curriculum studies, I am attuned to how language functions and why word choice matters. This means that when I am writing about a pedagogy of kinship and relationships with humans and more-than-human beings, I choose words that embody decolonization and support an ecological, emergent curriculum. So the word “discovery” (ChatGPT, personal communication, para. 2) does not align. It casts an eye towards Christopher Columbus and the “discovery” of a new land, which is decidedly misaligned with an Indigenous worldview and any efforts to reconcile. Also, although there is talk of relationships and connections between humans and the natural world, there is no mention of land or more-than-human beings from an Indigenous perspective.
The purpose of this post is effectively an attempt to build a relationship of sorts with ChatGPT. Could ChatGPT help someone begin to understand an idea? I think yes, with caution and wide-awakeness to potential gaps and lack of nuances that I mentioned above (Greene, 1977). I tend to steer away from dichotomies and would rather find my way through this new possibility rather than reject it outright simply because I worry about homogenization of knowledge and because it seems to represent a dominant worldview that doesn’t support my work.
So I will end with a call to action or a plea to approach ChatGPT with curiosity and caution, perhaps as you would with a new work colleague with whom you look to build a relationship. Without the typical rules of engagement when getting to know a new colleague, here are some suggestions about how to build a relationship with ChatGPT, whether using it yourself for your own work or receiving written work from students and colleagues:
- Greet ChatGPT with an openness and a readiness to learn.
- Pay attention to language and choice of words.
- Look for changes in language and tone that might indicate space for further development of written work.
- Consider a ChatGPT generated response as a starting point or springboard for further thoughts from multiple sources.
These are my musings at this moment in time. When using ChatGPT, I fully understand the capabilities of AI to become deeply nuanced, depending on how one fills out their profile and as it becomes more sophisticated. And yet, I do recommend that we proceed carefully and with the awareness of standardization, colonization, and homogenization of knowledge to be a very real risk without our full attention.
And so, what of a relationship with ChatGPT? Just like that analogy to a new work colleague, it is here. I’ll proceed the same way I do with new relationships: I’ll introduce myself, then listen carefully to the information that my new colleague shares with me, then I will responsibly and respectfully make choices about how to proceed in relationship together.
References:
Greene, M. (1977). Toward wide-awakeness: An argument for the arts and humanities in education. Teachers College Record, 79(1), 119–125. https://www.tcrecord.org/Content.asp?ContentId=1152
Kirkness, V. & Barnhardt, R. (1991). First nations and higher education: The four r’s — respect, relevance, reciprocity, responsibility. Journal of American Indian Education, 30(3), 1–15.
