Becoming-with-AI: Rethinking Professional Knowledge Through Generative Knowing

ABSTRACT

ChatGPT presents a significant disruption in the ways of knowing that highlight the value of control and mastery of knowledge as a quest for certainty. ChatGPT, as a step toward Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) lets us surface Schön’s prescient insight on the crisis of confidence in professionals. Instead of hastily asking questions about how to cope with the advances in artificial intelligence from the gaze of deficit and improvement, however, we resort to the nonrepresentational epistemologies that highlights reflection as seeing as . How might we reconceptualize a professional knowledge model that encourages ethical commitment to enacting practices that deploy relational forces within high-pressure, time-constrained professional environments? We attempt to answer the question by proposing a theory that cultivates conditions for experimenting with experiential encounters with others and creatively activating potentials, which we call generative knowing. Doing so, we suggest how compassionately disruptive condition mobilizes professional learners to engage the machinic creativity that collapses semiotic chains and effectuates diverse imaginations of the future of becoming-with ChatGPT.

KEYWORDS:

• Artificial general intelligence
• generative knowing
• professional knowledge
• ChatGPT
• reflection
• assemblage
• response-able

Acknowledgement

We extend our profound gratitude to Dr. Karen Watkins for her constructive and profound insight on this work. Also we immensely appreciate the editors and reviewers for their critical support and guidance on this project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. While we acknowledge the impact of artificial intelligence on art-making practices as a creative tool and ‘collaborative assistant for creativity’ (Anantrasirichai & Bull, 2022, p. 639), for the sake of this work, we narrow our discussion on ChatGPT’s impact on science-based professionals.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ahreum Lim

Ahreum Lim, works as a postdoctoral research scholar at the School for the Future of Innovation in Society and the School of Biological and Health System Engineering at Arizona State University. She is involved in a project that promotes ethics of care within the bioengineering community, serving as a methodologist specializing in participatory research design. She is also a research fellow at the Generative Learning and Complexity Laboratory (GLCL). She recently received a Ph.D. in Learning, Leadership, and Organization Development at University of Georgia (UGA). She used to work as a community engagement specialist at the MODE2L (Manufacturing Optimization, Design, and Engineering Education Lab) Group in the School of Environmental, Civil, Agricultural, and Mechanical Engineering at UGA. Her research interest spans engineering identity, professional development, transdisciplinary research, and inquiry-based intervention.

Aliki Nicolaides

Aliki Nicolaides, is Professor of Adult Learning and Leadership at the University of Georgia in the program of Learning, Leadership & Organization Development. Her research centers on exploring the intra-active dynamics of learning that generate personal and societal transformation. Dr. Nicolaides is co-founder of the Generative Learning and Complexity Laboratory (GLCL) that brings together scholars and practitioners of learning and complexity science to reimagine learning and development through the lens of generative knowing and complexity learning. The results of her scholarship are shaping a new philosophical strand of adult learning, what she describes as Generative Knowing: ways of being and becoming that liberate potential creatively in her first solo book. Dr. Nicolaides is a founding steward and current Director of the International Transformative Learning Association.