Ep14 - Why Students Trust ChatGPT: Dr. Julie Carpenter on AI Literacy, Attachment, and Human Lear...

When universities adopt AI at scale, do students learn to treat tools like ChatGPT as authoritative and trustworthy? In this episode of My Robot Teacher, Dr. Julie Carpenter joins Sarah and Taiyo to unpack AI in education through a sociotechnical lens and ask whether AI literacy can keep up with systems that don’t just answer our questions, but invite our trust, self-disclosure, and attachment. Dr. Carpenter is the author of The Naked Android: Synthetic Socialness and the Human Gaze, and her work examines how people make sense of artificial intelligence, robots, and emerging technologies. Together, we explore what happens when AI becomes part of the learning environment, and starts to feel like a tutor, therapist, friend, or authority. We discuss: Why institutional adoption can make AI feel vetted or trustworthy What a sociotechnical approach reveals about AI in education Anthropomorphism, attachment, and simulated empathy Surveillance, personalization, and the data students may not realize they’re giving away Why “AI booster” vs. “AI doomer” is the wrong frame What kinds of learning still depend on being seen, challenged, and cared for by another human CHAPTERS 00:00 Cold open and introduction 03:10 Meeting Julie through AI 05:29 RadioShack, tinkering, and early tech confidence 10:26 Institutional adoption and trust 19:11 AI inevitability, anthropomorphism, and design 29:56 Beyond doomers and boosters 39:02 Julie’s own use of AI 41:16 Authority, care, and the classroom 52:01 Sarah and Taiyo reflect on human-AI relationships My Robot Teacher is hosted by Sarah Senk and Taiyo Inoue and sponsored by the California Education Learning Lab and produced by Editaudio. #AIinEducation #ChatGPT #HigherEducation #AILiteracy #ArtificialIntelligence #EdTech #TeachingWithAI #CalState #MyRobotTeacher 📄 Full transcripts available: https://calearninglab.org/myrobotteac... 🌐 More about the show: https://www.myrobotteacher.ai 📨 Email us! myrobotteacherpod@gmail.com 🔔 Subscribe for more conversations about AI, higher education, teaching, learning, and what it means to stay human in the age of intelligent machines.