Artificial Intelligence and Religion Exploratory Session

Teaching Religious Studies in a post-chatGPT World: Precautions and Plans

With the advent of ChatGPT there is both opportunity and danger for faculty teaching religious studies and students learning about religious studies. If an A.I. can produce well-written texts that are indistinguishable from human work, how do we reconceptualize our pedagogies? Language is value-laden so as LLMs convey both biases and the stereotypes of our culture, how can a social justice perspective address this in the Religious Studies classroom? In keeping with this year’s conference theme, we welcome creative conversation about how religion and theology might provide a social justice-oriented lens through which to explore artificial intelligence in university education. We seek papers that explore the issues surrounding chatGPT (and other large language models) as well as pedagogical experiments that faculty may be doing in their classrooms either to incorporate or to combat Large Language models and their effects. 

Please note that this session uses the AAR full-papers program, in which papers are made available before the meeting. Accepted proposers should expect to produce article-length papers (4000-7000 words) that will be due by mid-October 2023.