Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to profoundly change
work, education, creativity, and social life as we now know it. Except some of
what it produces is total crap. In this talk, I explore how I figured out that
ChatGPT was lying to me. I argue that as students, educators, and researchers
in this so-called “post-truth era,” when b*llshit is cogent and rhetoric and
ideology compel more than data and evidence, we must find ways to grow and
teach skills in the detection of BS. This is not just about technology. It’s
about the fight for the right to skills of critical thinking in the heaping
information garbage pile we inhabit.