So some deans at Vanderbilt got in trouble for publishing a response to a recent campus shooting. It seemed to hit all the notes you’d expect from a college diversity office … but at the bottom, there was this sentence:
(Paraphrase from OpenAI’s ChatGPT AI language model, personal communication, February 15, 2023).
Students were in an uproar, and the deans have temporarily stepped down. Murphy’s Law: Several students at the school had siblings at the school where the shooting occurred.
But even if they hadn’t … you can see why it would strike those involved as, at the very least, tone-deaf.
As you read the message, it does seem to say all the things you’d expect it to say. But the final sentence–an effort to be truthful, perhaps?–negated everything that came before it.
“They couldn’t even be bothered to take the time to be empathetic,” you can hear them say. “They had a robot do it.”
The act offended the morality of the campus.
I’m reminded of a coffee shop owner who had to bite his tongue when a college student came in and grilled him: Do you sell fair-trade beans? The owner said yes but also explained that fair trade wasn’t always the best option for poor farmers due to the costs involved.
The student seemed to blank on this explanation. I just wanted to make sure you were doing it the right way–give me a hot chocolate. Who cares about coffee. Her morality was secure!
What does your operation “look like” to customers?
Perhaps that’s unfair to paint her in that light, as if she was being silly. The point is … what do your customers care about?
What does your operation “look like” to customers?
Take some time this week to walk in your customers’ shoes and see it from their angles. Don’t leave out any departments, any customer touch points. What opportunities do you have to communicate care in your processes, policies and operations?
Final note: If the deans had not included the ChatGPT note … would you have been able to tell it was machine-generated? Seth Dillon (creator of the Babylon Bee, a sort of evangelical Onion satire newspaper) had the experience of ChatGPT fabricating court cases. You’ll notice in the link that we can’t see his initial query, so maybe he shouldn’t be surprised it had to make something up.
But what if he passed it off to us? Could we tell? How dependent are we going to be on machines instead of on thinking?
I am further convinced that your employees desperately need classical education’s treasures.
If you want to explore what that could look like in a workplace:
Training employees classically … like Mr. Miyagi
Employees who THINK! (like Lincoln did: thanks to geometry)
Ensure you think things through using the “Common Topics”
Happy reading.