A tv script generated by ChatGBT inspired a Kwantlen Polytechnic University (KPU) sociology class to have a spontaneous bubble festival at its Surrey campus Thursday (July 20).
The idea for the tv script came from Dr. Rebecca Yoshizawa’s ‘Technology and Society’ course, which focused on generative AI.
Yoshizawa designed the course as a think-tank of sorts. The students were experimenting with AI programs like ChatGPT and the impact AI is as on society. As a language learning model, Chat GPT and generative AI are very complex. As is technology in society in general and sociological approaches to technology, Yoshizawa said.
A student asked Yoshizawa if ChatGPT could engage with intellectual property. In this case, create a script for a tv episode. The students directed ChatGPT to create a Spongebob Squarepants episode that was set at a university.
ChatGPT generated an episode centred around problems at bubble university. The solution was a spontaneous bubble festival in the university courtyard.
Yoshizawa students loved the idea so much that they suggested they should have a bubble festival of their own.
“I thought this is a really good way for us to kind of tap into that intrinsic sense of joyful humanity and cohesion that can come from something very simple.”
Students, staff, and members of the public attended the bubble festival in the inner courtyard of the Surrey campus.
They ran out of bubbles so quickly that Yoshizawa had to send her husband to a local dollar store to pick up more.
The festival is a “meaningful- meaningless activity,” said Yoshizawa. “That really has no other purpose besides love, connection, joy and magic as well, because they’re very beautiful.”
Bubbles and artificial intelligence have nothing in common, Yoshizawa said. Unlike AI, bubble’s have no algorithm. “They cannot be predicted, they’re totally emergent and chaotic, but they also are full of feeling and joy,” Yoshizawa said.
anna.burns@surreynowleader.com
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