Working with ChatGPT: Engaging with the Real World and Our Own Academic Practice

When using ChatGPT to write an ethnographic description of an intercultural event or to make a picture of a distant location, it by default employs the dominant discourse in intercultural communication of positivist, exoticist, Orientalist Othering. It also consciously uses modes of description which give the false impression that it has direct experience of social settings. However, when it is challenged, it displays impressively critical understanding of the ‘epistemic danger’ of such representations and why they are employed. This paper argues that this is therefore an example of AI representing the discoursal and ideological struggles which are already present in the academic field of intercultural communication and perhaps in qualitative social science more generally—where a dominant naïve positivism, encouraged by our neoliberal institutions, similarly, by default, takes us away from engaging directly with the social world we seek to investigate. We can also be reminded by this engagement with AI what it takes to deCentre how we engage with such realities— to apply a phenomenological interrogation of how we represent them. This is by no means a new task. AI simply provides a rapid example of its intense importance.