Abstract:

The work reports the experience in media and Artificial Intelligence (AI) litteracy carried out with undergraduate students of the degree course in Educommunication at the University of São Paulo, Brazil. This course is responsible for preparing teachers who work mainly in public high schools throughout Brazil. During the first semester of 2023, when the GPT-3 chatbot was opened to the general public and a great debate opened about the impacts of AI in education, students were invited to choose work topics related to the 17 Sustainable Development Goals ( SDG) of the United Nations and to use the OpenAI GPT-3 chatbot to explore double-binding paradoxes (Bateson) present between the propositions that underlie the SDG and the practical actions of individuals, companies and governments. After freely choosing the theme to be researched and relating it to one or more of the SDGs, the students used several open source tools available online to produce memes that ironically (or dramatically) expressed the hypocrisy between commitments made in the speeches and the practices actually adopted. The collective presentation of the memes in the classroom and the fruitful debate among the students showed how new technologies can be used educommunicatively to build a collective awareness about the SDGs while gaining greater litteracy in relation to algorithms capable of deep learning.
Some relevant points to be discussed:
The ability of deep learning neural networks to identify and make explicit double bind paradoxes present in our societies in a way that we ourselves struggle to see.
Students' ability to express these paradoxes in the language of memes, encapsulating complex semantic structures in ironic or dramatic memes.
The educommunicative appropriation of open access AI technologies to produce critical content on socially current and relevant topics.
The semiotic analysis of memes, showing how memes communicate and eventually educate by a complex arrangement of icons, indexes and symbols.

References:
[1] Bateson, G. (2000). Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology (Ed. Revised). University of Chicago Press.
[2] Blackmore, S. (1999). The Meme Machine. Oxford University Press.
[3] Carneiro, C. L., & Medrado, A. R. (2020). Memes e práticas de educomunicação: Usos e apropriações na formação de professores. Revista Tempos e Espaços em Educação, 13(30), 273-294.
[4] Danesi, Marcel (2019), Memes and the Future of Pop Culture, Leiden, Brill. DOI : 10.1163/25894439-12340001
[5] Santos, G. R., & Maia, M. L. (2021). Memes como recursos educacionais: Uma análise da produção e utilização no ensino superior. Revista Práxis Educacional, 17(42), 321-338.
[6] Watzlawick, P., Weakland, J. H., & Fisch, R. (1974). Change: Principles of Problem Formation and Problem Resolution. W. W. Norton & Company.

Keywords:

Sustainability, Artificial Intelligence, Educommunication, Double Binding Paradox, GPT, Memes, Sustainable Development Goals (SDG).