Ran Hua, Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Journalism and Communication, Shanghai University
At present, digital academic production has become a new scene ofthe academic field byreplacing digital academic communication. The chatbot ChatGPT has once again revolutionized the way knowledge is produced. The emergence ofAIGC (AI-Generated Content)is bound to cause ethical dilemmas ofdigital academic production.
Facing the ethical challenge, we have tostrengthen the construction of digital academic community. The academic circle should see things from the reflexive perspective. On the one hand, knowledge workers need to step back and accept therole of AI technologies in all aspects of academic research and acknowledge their contribution to academic work. Artificial intelligence technology should not be treated simply with technological determinism or social determinism, but should be rationally developed and utilized from the standpoint of technological transformation. On the other hand, we need to strengthen the sense of community. In the face of the academic ethical pressure brought by ChatGPT, some CSSCI source journals in China have issued statementsthat for the time being, they would not accept any articles individually or jointly signed by large language models (LLM). However, a more ideal scenario might be thatthe ethical responsibilities of academic research are not necessarily imposed on any end of academic production or communication, but that we effectively enhance the awareness of community to prevent greater risks of digital academic ethical lapses.
We should proactivelyavoid the logic of "integration of production and consumption"in digital academic research. First, we should seriously believe human beings areresponsible for academic research. Despite thatAI has become an important member of the "actor network" and may even have gainedsome "autonomy" inacademicresearch, it faces key problems such as opaque learning process, data source corruptionand wrong instructions. Then the decision-makers of academic research can only be humans. Only humanscan fully carry forward the spirit of science and humanity. Second, we should resist the trend of "academic capitalism" of platforms. In digital academic research, weshould enhance itspublicnatureand effectively resist the trend of commercialization of academic results. The digital academic community must also resistthe stranglehold of "capital -- technology" and resolutely preventtechnology platforms and commercial capital from doing what they should not do in order to benefit themselvesin academic research. Third, weshould avoid the cyclical limitations brought by the model of "integration of production and consumption". In academic research, weshould avoid fast production and fast consumption, and strengthen the vitality and influence of digital academic research results. The academic community should make full use of the open academic environment to test if research resultsare scientific, andestablish a reasonable and sufficient selection mechanism to promote the transformation of academic results, so that they are fundamentally beneficial to the development of human society.
Media intellectuals in the digital age should persist inthe pursuit of new knowledge and being sages. On the one hand, in the face of the argument that "algorithmsdecide everything", intellectuals must enthusiastically adhere to the poetic spirit, improvethe prejudgmentability, and thus break the myth of "data supremacy" and ensure human beings’"poetic dwelling" in the digital world. On the other hand, digital knowledge workers fundamentally need to transcend the relevance, the causal logic and the relational existence of human beings to make surethe ethical vision that pursues excellence and moral integrity. Digital knowledge workers fundamentally need to maintain the impulse to become sages and voluntarily play a major role in promotingknowledgeand morality inthe digital society. Just because, in the era of "man-machine" communication, how to make "material morality" possible and where the power of knowledge is, need to be guided by positive values of capable intellectuals.
Published on April 27, 2023