Introduction
When thinking of artificial intelligence, it’s easy to picture a future where intelligent robots existentially threaten humanity’s role on Earth. Since OpenAI released ChatGPT in November 2022, anyone with a smart device and an internet connection can access and leverage the generative capabilities of powerful Large Language Models (LLMs). The implications of this historic event are not yet understood. It seems almost certain that AI chatbots are here to stay- with big tech giants like Google and Meta releasing their own large language models designed to compete with OpenAI. Ultimately, AI has become the latest innovation with the potential to transform and challenge contemporary life. And, it appears that humanity is set to face a plethora of unprecedented challenges encouraged by the diffusion of increasingly innovative AI technologies.
Background
For the most part, I hope we can agree that contemporary life is becoming increasingly complex. At the time of writing, the average UK citizen is influenced by interacting factors: complex bureaucratic institutions, communication technologies, financial systems, markets and political systems (to name a few). Global mobility, for example, has brought people from diverse cultural backgrounds together into shared localities. While cultural diversity is something to be celebrated, it nevertheless encourages increasingly complex sociocultural networks and groupings that require a nuanced approach to communication.
Interestingly, while studying at Durham University, I found myself on a course where most students were classed as “international students”. Although I was a UK citizen at a UK university, in terms of social and cultural background, I was in the minority. With friendships naturally forming over the year, I built rapport with the individuals who composed the intricate communities under the umbrella term: “international student”. My new-found friends and I engaged in countless conversations where AI became the central topic. The aforementioned conversations provided the necessary motivation to focus the analysis on how non-native-speaking international students use AI chatbots while studying at university.
Over the summer months, I conducted 12 ethnographic semi-structured interviews with non-native-speaking post-graduate students from a leading UK university. Below is a very brief summary of the key findings:
Findings
The diverse sociocultural networks that shaped the experience of international students stimulated relationships where it was important- even vital- for cross-cultural communication. This is where AI comes into it: When endeavouring to establish friendships with people from diverse backgrounds, some respondents expressed how they adopted AI technology (LLMs) to decode cultural differences and overcome language barriers. For them, AI chatbots- notably ChatGPT, Gemini and CoPilot- were useful companions for overcoming the challenge of relating to those with different cultural customs, norms and values. Thereby, allowing for cross-cultural communication with people from different backgrounds.
For respondents, user-prompted LLM output alleviated the pressure of learning and writing in a non-native language. Prompting ChatGPT (and other LLM chatbots), my respondents could refine their written text and express ideas clearly by using suggestions to improve their work. Rather than mindlessly copying and pasting output, my respondents elected to use AI output as a suggestion in which they would build their creative ideas. By strategically leveraging AI output, my respondents could efficiently manage their work/life schedule by using the technology to assist in academic writing tasks and deciphering non-native texts using AI as a language assistant.
My respondents felt they had the necessary skills to ‘responsibly’ leverage from AI-generated output. However, they were less optimistic when considering how ‘others’ used AI. Considering the future, respondents expressed the anxiety that other students were already too reliant on AI technology. Ultimately, worrying that, in future, over-reliant individuals could become ‘slaves’ to the output generated by the new non-human overlords. With that in mind, most of my interlocutors reasoned that individuals who can apply ‘critical thinking skills’ when engaging with generative AI output are best positioned to use the technology to benefit them economically in future.
My thoughts
The future has arrived! We are in an AI age. Artificial intelligence impacts the lives of people across the globe, right now! It is an issue that affects you whether you know it or not. For example, can you (the reader) guarantee this blog post hasn’t been written by or- at least- supplemented by the output of ChatGPT?
Moving into a future, where the prospect of achieving Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is probable, I hope more anthropologists join an interdisciplinary effort to secure AI's safe and sustainable use. Therefore, mitigating the risks and maximising the benefits of AI use across sociocultural contexts.
Ultimately, I hope this brief outline of my dissertation project will, at the very least, encourage the reader to consider the future implications of adopting, augmenting and diffusing an increasingly intelligent non-human actor. The future may be unknown but as historian Yuval Noah Harari says: “If we can’t change the future, then why waste time discussing it?”
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