I've got a new newsletter out:
A few weeks ago a mentor and friend asked me how I planned to address ChatGPT, or how we as faculty ought to engage with this technology as we try to prepare our students to be scholars and thinkers in a world where it exists. This is my sort of question: so far my entire scholarly career has been devoted to trying to understand how corporations, states, and the experts they employ have used, abused, made, and re-made the categories that structure our daily experiences of being human. I've written books about two of the biggest and most important aggregators of personal data in American History: the life insurance industry and the US Census. (Did you know, btw, that Democracy's Data is out in paperback next week?)

Yet, up until I received that e-mail, I had never even opened a ChatGPT account or attempted a conversation. I had in fact been avoiding it. So, this newsletter is an attempt to explain why I was (and am) wary. I hope to aid my fellow teachers (broadly defined) in thinking about how to embrace that wariness in a productive way.

Read more: https://buttondown.email/danbouk/arch...