Provost Joanna Waley-Cohen at Commencement 2023

Chancellor Tong! President Hamilton! President Designate Mills! Vice-Chancellor Lehman! Friends! Colleagues! Parents! Ladies and gentlemen, salute with me our great students of the Class of 2023! Dear students, on behalf of the whole NYU Shanghai community, from the bottom of my heart I offer you congratulations upon your graduation. We are really, really proud of you for getting to this glorious moment.

During your time as NYU Shanghai students you have learned a lot, in terms of knowledge, in terms of skills, and in terms of the values that will guide you as you move forward in life. Yes! You have done it, you have made it, you have got there. But I want to speak to you today less about the past, about all that you have achieved, and more about the future, a future that right now you can only imagine. For imagination, the ability to think about what you do not know and to be continuously creative and resourceful, is what will power you through your lives, in whatever direction you take, and, as we have been saying to you all this time, imagination is also the foundation of creativity.

The great physicist Albert Einstein once famously observed that "imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”

Imagination is not something limited by place or culture or education. It is not specifically Chinese, or Western, or Southern, or Northern, or anything else. It is everywhere; everyone possesses it, and everyone should exercise it to the utmost.

Over the past few months imagination has featured frequently in conversations both here at NYU Shanghai and around the world in two completely different contexts that I would like to suggest—to imagine—are in fact quite closely linked in unexpected ways.

The first context has to do with the great camphor tree that now flourishes in our courtyard, and the connectedness of living beings, including both humans and plants. As many of you know, this tree, which is 80 or 100 years old or more, was born and grew up in Fuzhou, Jiangxi, and from there, to save it and thousands of its friends from a flooding project, it was moved about 20 years ago to Minhang on the outskirts of Shanghai. Who could have imagined so many mature trees being literally uprooted and moving to a new home like that? And most of them survived.

Who could have imagined such a thing? When a generous supporter, the person who saved those trees, offered us a tree for our new campus, this was the one that we chose, and last fall it was uprooted again and moved by the same team of nurserymen that had accompanied it from its old home 20 years earlier and taken care of it ever since. It was heaved up out of the ground by two gigantic cranes and gently placed on a huge truck that brought it over to our campus in the dead of night when there wasn’t much other traffic, and replanted in our courtyard the next day.

To keep it company, a number of other smaller trees have been planted nearby, and that is what I want to talk about. Most people know that plants cross-fertilize, but we are now starting to learn about what is sometimes called the wood wide web, the vast network of sociability that link plants in ways both seen and unseen, above and below ground, through their sensory capabilities and also through their roots and through intricate, complex fungal networks. Plants and trees, for instance, can share nutrients, they can use chemicals and scents to alert each other to potential dangers, they help one another out in countless ways we might not readily imagine.

Indeed, who could have imagined such a thing? Who could have imagined not only a massive tree being moved like that, not once but twice, but also who could have imagined what turns out to be the sociability and perhaps consciousness of trees, that they thrive best with others around them, and that they communicate with one another and with other plants. At a minimum this should get our imaginative selves thinking about connectedness, about the hidden web of help that sustains us through life and about the ways we can help others in ways seen and unseen, and about the inspirational possibilities that come from what we don’t know but might, if we let ourselves, be able to imagine. What, for instance, can the tree itself imagine?

Now all of this brings to mind something else that everyone is talking about. And that is the large language model best known as ChatGPT. What does Chat GPT have to do with imagination or, for that matter, with an ancient tree? Chat GPT is a probability distribution over sequences of words that is trained using massive amounts of data. Imagination does not figure into how it functions. But imagination and a reach for the unknown do figure into humans’ working out how to use large language models most effectively. For example Chat GPT always sounds authoritative, but how do we know that it is actually right? When we assess its response to a question we pose to it, we also have to use not only our knowledge—what we know—but our imagination—what we could know—to gauge the accuracy and usefulness of the response, in order to use it to our advantage without getting led astray.

We have probably all seen examples of extraordinary right-on-point ChatGPT responses, and we have probably all seen examples of subtly incorrect responses—the one that said I had won a prestigious prize that I never won, though I might have done, or the one that correctly identified an actual work of art but misidentified its location, for instance, or that gave convincing sounding scholarly references that turn out not to exist. But we should not reject it for sometimes being mistaken or misleading. As long as we are open to it, and use our imagination, we can partner with AI, not to do our work for us, but to foster our own creativity by letting it act as a source of inspiration, leading us towards a whole new world of extraordinary possibilities.

On the one hand an ancient tree literally rooted in the past and on the other the very latest advances in artificial intelligence, that many people have called a turning point towards the future in human society; where do their paths cross? Nature and technology, past and future: can we imagine what they might conceivably have in common?

I will, in fact, leave that to your imagination, but I want to conclude by sharing parts of a commencement speech ChatGPT wrote for you, at my request, in the style of Treebeard, the tree-like creature or ENT in Lord of the Rings:

Ah, greetings young saplings and fresh shoots! I am Treebeard, shepherd of the forests and protector of all that is green and growing. In this world of steel and stone, where the hustle and bustle of the city can sometimes make us forget the importance of nature, we must remember the true value of trees. Trees are not just plants, they are living, breathing beings that provide us with the air we breathe, the shade we seek, and the beauty we admire.

In my forests in Middle-earth, my kin and I watched as the world changed, as the forces of industry threatened to destroy the natural balance. But we stood firm, rooted in the earth, and with the help of our allies, we fought back against the forces of destruction. And so, I urge you, dear graduates, to be like the trees, and let your roots go deep, your branches reach high, and your hearts be filled with the spirit of the forest.

In this world of constant change and uncertainty, remember that the trees are always watching, always listening, and always growing. Let them be your guides and your mentors, and may their wisdom inspire you to be the best version of yourself.

So, young saplings and fresh shoots, may the blessings of the trees be upon you always. Congratulations on your commencement from NYU Shanghai, and may your journey ahead be filled with joy, wonder, and a deep connection to one another and to the natural world.

Class of 2023: as you imagine a bright future and how you will contribute to it…congratulations!