A humanities take on generative AI or You Can Just Learn Stuff!
In 2014, two professors at the University of Washington, Carl Bergstrom (a biologist) and Jevin West (an information scientist) released a course syllabus online called Calling Bullshit. It was based on a class they co-taught to help people understand how to manage living in a modern information environment.
The nature of the internet means anyone can communicate with anyone else, anywhere in the world, at any time, for basically free. It’s a human amplifier. It amplifies our good parts as well as our bad parts.
It also degrades many of the institutions that were build on a foundation of the printing press: political (laws), social (centers of trust), and informational (sources of truth).
The printing press made copying basically free (if you owned the press), but distribution was costly. For hundreds of years, we built up institutions (like the corporation and the nation state) built on these assumptions. Now they are no longer true.
One thing to note: They’re using the word “bullshit” intentionally, not as a derogatory term, but in the academic sense, formulated in Harry Frankfurt’s 2005 essay On Bullshit. It’s a dense, but short and really great read. Bullshit is basically defined as:
Bullshit is speech intended to persuade without regard for truth. The liar cares about the truth and attempts to hide it; the bullshitter doesn’t care whether what they say is true or false.
I’m sure it also helps to get attention since it means academics get to swear a lot. And swearing in formal environments is fun.
It’s positioned as a curriculum for teachers to pick up and use, but because it was designed as an “inverted curriculum” with all the reading and videos and exercises done as homework and discussion in the classroom, it’s also really easy to use for self-guided learning. It’s got everything you need. And the modules are short.
I think it’s unique because while there’s a lot of in depth stuff out there about how generative AI works, there’s very little (besides a lot of superficial hot takes) about what it really is and how it affects people and society. From their summary:
We view this as a course in the humanities, because it is a course about what it means to be human in a world where LLMs are becoming ubiquitous, and it is a course about how to live and thrive in such a world. This is not a how-to course for using generative AI. It’s a when-to course, and perhaps more importantly a why-not-to course.
Just as the internet brings us a lot of things that makes it feel like the world is falling apart, it also brings us little miracles (which are harder to notice) like this.
A college level course that anyone, anywhere, at any time can take to help make sense of <waves arms around>.
