Vanderbilt DEI Administrators in Trouble for Using ChatGPT To Write a Statement About Michigan Mass Shooting

Over at Vanderbilt University, bureaucrats in the Office for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) are in trouble. On February 16, they sent an email to the student body urging inclusivity and compassion in the wake of a tragic mass shooting at Michigan State University, where a gunman killed three students and left others in critical condition. The only problem: They used ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence (A.I.) text generator, to write the boilerplate statement.

The next day, anti-A.I. outcry prompted Assistant Dean for EDI Nicole Joseph to send a follow-up apology to the student body. (She refrained from using ChatGPT that time.)

“While we believe in the message of inclusivity expressed in the email, using ChatGPT to generate communications on behalf of our community in a time of sorrow and in response to a tragedy contradicts the values that characterize Peabody College,” she wrote.

“There is a sick and twisted irony to making a computer write your message about community and togetherness because you can’t be bothered to reflect on it yourself,” student Bethanie Stauffer told The Vanderbilt Hustler, the school’s newspaper.

Stauffer and other critics, reacting to administrators’ perceived insincerity, are missing that these types of messages were probably always insincere; they’re canned and formulaic, perhaps with some good intentions buried beneath the mollifying prose but no real original thought or valuable insight. If there hadn’t been a line in the email crediting authorship to ChatGPT, students probably wouldn’t have ev