What AI changes about viewpoint diversity

What AI changes about 'Viewpoint Diversity'Reviewing a book in which I appearHollis RobbinsApr 27, 20261776ShareI wrote this a month ago, after the first major review of Viewpoint Diversity: What It Is, Why We Need It and How to Get It, edited by Bernard Schweizer and John Tomasi, appeared, on March 20, in Inside Higher Ed. The reviewer, John K. Wilson, did not like the volume, calling it ideologically narrow and arguing that “[e]xpanding protections of academic freedom and tenure would do more to expand viewpoint diversity than anything proposed in this book.” Wilson doubled down in a second review, also negative, three days later, saying that focusing on political representation “betrays academic standards.” I have seen no other reviews, negative or positive, since, except for Jesse Singal’s review of Wilson’s reviews on his Substack, and John Tomasi’s letter to the editor responding to the review on March 23. I am weighing in because most essays in the volume, including mine, entitled “Viewpoint Diversity in the era of AI,” have little to do with the shots fired by Wilson and returned by Tomasi and Singal. My essay argues that while the grownups are fighting, students are off widening the Overton chat window on their large language models (LLMs) in the privacy of their dorm rooms. The viewpoint diversity available to students is perhaps only tangentially related to how their professors vote and whether they have tenure.“Every essay in this volume is written on the assumption that viewpoint diversity is a human project,” my essay begins. I argue that AI changes everything about what it means to have a viewpoint and to express it. I suspect the wider public is beginning to recognize this. When over 85% of students are chatting regularly with their LLMs, diverse views are no longer “rare” and may no longer need to be protected. I also suspect that most students are far less interested in their “own” views than the views open to them to try on. “Generated” diversity is a non-trivial complication to the entire viewpoint diversity movement. Academic leaders might think about clawing back the funds dedicated to “ensuring” diversity and spending the funds instead on faculty AI training. Wilson thinks that a book about viewpoint diversity should have more viewpoint diversity and that’s what my essay is about. I would have hoped he would have noticed and mentioned it (which he did not), because my whole point is that there is a superabundance of viewpoint diversity to be had in the AI era. “Nobody in this volume wants a pluralism that is ventriloquism, but that is the reality online,” I observe. Humans are authoring a narrower and narrower slice of what is available in the marketplace of ideas.Our Viewpoint Diversity volume should force a clarification (among my fellow contributors particularly) about the relationship between views held and views expressed. While every contributor defends open inquiry, pluralism, and the value of disagreement, there is little agreement about whether it’s important to assume or insist that a speaker “holds” the views expressed. Some do. Jon Haidt quotes John Stuart Mill: “Nor is it enough that he should hear the opinions of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them.” Tyler J. VanderWeele argues that it would be advantageous to have a faculty member who actually “holds…

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