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Will AI autotune my essay (Cormier 2023)? Are AI sceptics tilting at windmills in a quixotic questto be aligned with yesterday’s epistemic landscape (Perrotta 2023)? Is using ChatGPT like“eating plastic for your cognitive agency and natural intelligence” (Nephew 2023)?
Will AI autotune my essay (Cormier 2023)? Are AI sceptics tilting at windmills in a quixotic questto be aligned with yesterday’s epistemic landscape (Perrotta 2023)? Is using ChatGPT like“eating plastic for your cognitive agency and natural intelligence” (Nephew 2023)?
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ChatGPT, an AI model, being likened to a diet of plastic: 'Well, that escalated quickly 📈'"
These are questions that educators have been asking about Artificial Intelligence in Education(AIED) using metaphors. Such metaphors, from writing calculators to bullshit generators, andthe reactions they provoke carry pedagogical implications and imperatives that this
special collection seeks to interrogate. Metaphors "are always a double bind: they at once allow us tosee and stop up our abilities to notice" (Hejnol 2017). Metaphors may also be viewed as “a‘mental sandpit’ to explore issues from diferent perspectives” (Weller 2022: 170).
Hence this call aims to provide a space for researchers and scholars to critically discuss and analyse AIED via its metaphors and call attention to associated discourses, histories and practices.
Metaphors can point us in various directions. A well-known metaphor for the Large LanguageModel technology behind Generative AI (Gen AI), is that of a “stochastic parrot” (Bender et al.2021). This metaphor was used to illustrate how a believable but non-human voice could beguile us but
hide a range of ethical problems and harms involved in the creation of AI, or that AI perpetuates including discrimination based on ethnicity/race, gender, class or disability. In this vein, ChatGPT may be a “bullshit generator” - drawing on Harry Frankfurt’s metaphor for epistemic nihilism
which evokes a person less concerned with the truth than in being heard(Costello 2023). The bullshit metaphor can describe the output of a Gen AI chatbot but can also be used as a lens through which to see the efusive discourse of AI in education itself. The metaphors of the current AI Edtech