Valley News misrepresents AI at Dartmouth
We write with dismay in response to your 2/6 story on AI at Dartmouth, “At Dartmouth, ‘a whole new skill set.’” The name of the company with which our administration has consulted, Anthropic, does not appear—nor the fact that the deal was struck without faculty consultation and despite the fact that Anthropic used without permission books by 132 faculty members as part of a massive effort, “to destructively scan all the books in the world,” according to an Anthropic internal planning document reported on by The Washington Post. Without permission, they fed into their machine 18 books just by the undersigned alone, faculty of the Creative Writing program. Many of us across the entire faculty have made claims in the class-action suit against Anthropic. The generative AI students that are being encouraged to use appears to have been trained on the misappropriated scholarship and creative work of their human professors.
Your reporter writes, “faculty members in the humanities traditionally oppose AI and favor classic teaching methods.” In fact, there are no “traditions” with regard to AI, and many colleagues in the social sciences and STEM share our alarm at its encroachment. Nor are we in the humanities limited to “classic teaching methods,” unless by that you mean the kind that doesn’t include cheating.
Your reporter was certainly right to speak to our colleague Jed Dobson, who has thought deeply on these matters, but not a single other faculty member in the School of Arts and Sciences was interviewed. None of the many who’ve taken an informed and more critical position. No other humanists; no social scientists, nobody from undergraduate STEM apart from a dean representing the administration perspective. The relative absence of students is even more striking.
The article begins with an advocate of AI and ends by giving the last word to Evergreen.AI’s PR puffery. Somewhere in between, there’s an important story your reporter failed to find.
Sincerely,
Alexander Chee, Professor of English and Creative Writing
Sandhya Dirks, Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing
Thomas O’Malley, Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing
Peter Orner, Dartmouth Professor of English and Creative Writing
Jeff Sharlet, Frederick Sessions Beebe ’35 Professor of English and Creative Writing