I know Petra De Sutter. She isn’t just a silhouette on the evening news; she is a Professor in Reproductive Medicine, a past Green Party heavyweight, former Deputy Prime Minister, and the scientist who stood firmly by my side during one of the most physically challenging chapters of my life. I know her -not in the biblical sense, obviously- but well enough to confirm she is usually the smartest person in the room by a considerable margin, possessing an integrity that is almost annoying in its purity. Yet, last week, she walked face-first into the most banal trap of the twenty-first century. She stood up at a podium at the UGent New Year’s reception and delivered a speech laced with quotes that sounded profound but had the unfortunate quality of being entirely fictional, courtesy of a Large Language Model (hello dokter Chat GPT) that hallucinated like a confident drunk at a karaoke bar. It was embarrassing. It was sloppy. She got caught (of course), the academic crowd booed, the rest of the world booed, and the media descended with the kind of gleeful ferocity usually reserved for politicians who strangle puppies. She apologized immediately, owned the mistake, and promised to do better, which is about as rare in academics/politics as a unicorn riding a unicycle. But the noise didn’t stop. It got louder.
Bizarre. We are apparently currently spending more energy dissecting a hallucinated footnote (boo!) than we are discussing the actual geopolitical fires burning in Iran. Then you have the reactions from the cheap seats in the peanut gallery. Take Lisa Doeland, a philosopher -a job title that these days often implies having a LinkedIN account and a lot of existential dread- who went absolutely nuclear. She treated this incident as proof that Generative AI is the digital equivalent of opening the Ark of the Covenant and melting our collective faces off. It’s the worst thing since someone took a bite out of an apple in a garden a few millennia ago. She didn’t just critique the error; she demanded Petra’s head on a spike, calling her “incapable as a scientist and as a rector” and suggesting she be shown the door immediately. She herself never uses it, used it, will use it, and dams her student for even thinking about it. She claims students deserve better, warns them not to get dragged along by “capitalist logic” about efficiency, and essentially argues that if you aren’t suffering through texts yourself, you aren’t learning. And Petra should be hanged, drowned, flayed and quartered. To begin with. It’s the “burn the witch” approach to technological disruption. It is a predictable, boring, and frankly lazy reaction.
Ow boy. We are screaming at the clouds because it rained, instead of buying an umbrella. Philosopher or not, I learned not to slam down my boot on the head (or neck) of someone who fell. What’s the bloody point?
What I hope comes out of this mess is not just a bruised ego for Petra, but finally a realization that our institutions, schools, and universities (and their tutors, professors, lectors, teachers and students) are failing the moment. Pretending that students and staff aren’t using these tools is childish, immature and world-idiotic. It’s a game of “don’t ask, don’t tell” that helps absolutely no one. We are currently trying to run academia like it’s 1987, hoping that if we close our eyes tight enough, the silicon valley algorithms will vanish and we can go back to index cards and microfiche. That is not going to happen. Camouflaging the use of AI is the problem, pushing it as a thing of the dark web of “cheating” is the problem not the use itself. (and by Toutatis: Odin know GenAI has issues… from IP, ethics, energy, cooling, …). If a former Deputy Prime Minister with a massive academic pedigree can get caught like a drunken mouse in the trap, imagine what the average sophomore is doing right now to finish an essay on structuralism.
You cannot put the toothpaste back in the tube, no matter how much philosophers yell at the bathroom sink. The stuff is out. It is messy. It stains. But instead of banning toothpaste, maybe we should teach people how to brush responsibly. We need transparent guidelines, clear rules on Intellectual Property, and a distinct line between “assistance” and “authorship.” We need to stop the witch hunts and start the onboarding process.
Maybe we should actually thank Petra De Sutter for unintentionally lighting the flare; she showed us that “Houston, we have a problem,” and the problem isn’t (only) the machine, it’s our hypocrisy in how we wield it.
#AI #Ethics #Toothpaste
